Outside; the sidewalk, the light from the display windows blue and rather swimming. The door swings open and the bells jangle, off key and tinny, and the door might swing too hard, not because he is throwing it open but because he is stronger than most; stronger than he needs to be to open a door.
Hawksley lets go her hand, does not pull her after him in his wake and she takes her hand back, rubs her thumb over her knuckles where she can still feel the warmth of his mouth, glances back at Leonhard and Adam and Grace and even Patience and probably gives them brief, spare sort of smiles that feel uncertain and a bit rootless and she is kinda fucked up so the shadows feel sharper, strange and red. Adam; yes, she notices the lessening of welcome in his farewell.
But mostly; she follows Hawksley onto the sidewalk. Catches the door on its return passage and pushes it open with her knuckles and takes follows him onto the sidewalk and catches up and she can walk better and faster in those shoes when she wants to do so.
Catches up and glances at his profile and then the night beyond him and then him again.
"You okay?"
HawksleySera is so high. So drunk, so gone, and Hawksley adores her like this. But to be fair, he adores her sober. When she was fasting last summer he'd only had sex with her the once, and that was primarily for her, there was a joining but also a one-sidedness to it, and yet, all the same, he was with her when she was drinking juice and doing nothing else. It didn't seem natural, and it didn't seem her, and he said as much, even if in that very moment she might have thought he was just trying to get her to give it up so they could fuck.
She is as she is. And she will change. But, he thinks, it will not be on the path of restraint.
Hawksley is a bit rougher with the door than he needs to be. He's annoyed. The anger has abated into annoyance, into aggravation, and even that abates a bit more when she finds his hand again. If he even notices that Adam Likes Sera Less or something because she brought Hawksley and Hawksley Is Just Awful, he might actually feel remorse or,
no. Let's be honest. He'd think Adam was a total douchebag for that. But he doesn't notice. Sera does. Sera doesn't tell him.
He holds her hand, lacing their fingers together in welcome, slowing his steps a bit because her heels are ridiculous. He doesn't want to feel like she's mincing after him, baby wait, anything like that. It would be repulsive to him. So even if his stride is longer and his feet flatter and his energy snarling, he slows. That's the whole point of leaving, to slow himself down a bit. He turns to look at her.
"Yeah," he says. Shakes his head. "Fucking Hermetics," he adds.
SerafíneIn the shadows on the street a few storefronts up and she's caught up to him and he's slowed down and that's something she notices, Sera, that's something that her scattered senses see and disclose and parcel out to her as she catches up and he takes her hand. Her right hand in his left, the cool, beaten circle of the ring he gave her at Christmas ever-present on her right index finger. She doesn't even think about it except perhaps sometimes the way she thinks about the stitch her Avatar made in the joint of her thumbs. The line drawn taut; familiar, familiar.
Necessary, necessary.
"I thought you'd like that place." Sera says, and there's something about the way her hand curves into his. Something about the way she smooths her thumb over his knuckles. It is not meant to soothe him, that gesture. It is not meant to bring him back to earth. He's supposed to soar. She does it because it gives her pleasure to feel his skin against her skin. Because there is always something new beneath the whorls of her thumb and fingertips.
Sera does not apologize for taking him there, but there's a kind of apology sketched into her tone. "You know, all the books. And Adam I guess in my head you guys were sure to adore each other.
"Not so much though, huh?" A beat. Then, " - all those names." Her voice sounds strange to her. Like it is both echoing, expansive, and hermetically sealed. "They're all yours."
HawksleyHas he noticed, since Christmas, that every time he's seen her she's been wearing that ring? He hasn't mentioned it. He did take her finger in his mouth, on at least one occasion, while they were in Rio and so in these strange ways she was inside of him just as he was inside of her, and his lips brushed against the bronze but he didn't mention it. He may have met her eyes, briefly, while tasting her finger, which had until that moment been pleasuring herself.
Not really the time to ask her about her jewelry.
She thought he'd like that place. He frowns. all the books, Adam, adore. "It's a fine place," he tells her. "The guy is kind of a prick." Adam, he means. He doesn't delve into that. He exhales. He's stopping on the sidewalk, turning to her, still holding her hand. "I lost my temper. But you're a Disciple," he says, like she doesn't know. It's not something they've mentioned aloud, but it's also the truth he's known since Dan called him and he was with her in the hospital. "Even if you weren't. You're not a teenager. You're not a child. And he has no cause to be acting avuncular with you, for fucks's sake. That 'girl' shit is grotesque."
Hawksley exhales, looking aside. It's not an apology. It's an explanation. He seldom gives either.
"There's more to it than that." His names, that is. It's longer. "But I thought it might make him back off, if I just laid it out a little."
SerafíneThere's something complex in her face when he turns to her; not for Adam and the bookstore, but the next bit. When he tells her what they both already know, what Sera herself has never said aloud: that she is a Disciple. That she has a new kind of power; that she can bend reality that much further and that has felt strange and cloudy and clotted up in her body for weeks and weeks after her seeking, caught between this shifting uncertainty that somehow what will come might strip her of her individuality while molding her into -
- what, what next? The last few weeks, though. She wants magick all the time; she just feels suffused with it, with the promise of power. Even hear and now the seconds tick by and she can see them sometimes in her periphery and the urge to make them un-tick is remarkble.
"I never even really thought about it. Not like that." This curl of her shoulders, and he's turning to her and she's turning into him a bit, and she never lets go of his hand. "How people think about me. How they talk to me.
"Mostly I ignore it. 'Cos mostly they're fucking wrong."
Sometimes she provokes them. That works, too.
"You know you don't have to tell me anything - " preamble, and her eyes all darkly luminous are quick on his face, she finds his eyes, She never lets go. "Why'd they kick you out? That one house?"
Hawksley"I found myself on my knees drawing arcane symbols for a pair of wizards," he tells her, flatly, looking straight at her. "I found myself just accepting their will and whim as law in exchange for knowledge. It sapped all the wonder out of what I was learning, all the life. And when Nefertiti threw a goddamn book at my head, I threw it back at her, and that,"
Hawksley says, levelly,
"effectively ended my apprenticeship."
He's quiet a moment. He'd never keep this from her; she just hasn't asked. And now they're just standing there. On the street corner, not crossing either way, and the urge he felt in the bookstore to take her somewhere hasn't abated, in spite of or because of everything else on his mind. He wants to kiss her and it doesn't make much sense but that's never stopped him before.
"If you can ignore it when someone pictures you on your knees just because you know you aren't, maybe that's fine. But maybe everyone else starts seeing it as you accepting being forced to your knees. And treats you like that, speaks to you like that. And maybe eventually you find yourself on the ground and don't know how you got there, except by ignoring it. Allowing it." He exhales a low breath. "We create or deny changes in reality with our will. Not through willful ignorance.
"It doesn't have to matter to you how he talks to you or thinks of you. But if no one ever calls him on this shit, he'll go on thinking he's A-OK, he's a Nice Guy, he's not doing anything wrong, and he'll go on doing it to you and Grace and every Sleeper he encounters simply because no one ever told him to fuck off. And one day he'll be as powerful as you, or moreso, and someone out there won't have the luxury or strength to ignore him because he's wrong."
He's still agitated. He shakes his head, looking like an animal. "I fucking hate Hermetics who think they're better than everyone else. Like that punk-ass book jockey, you know what his deal was? Talking about how lines of apprenticeship and supernatural lineage were more important than the fact that a book I was buying was handwritten by the great-great grandmother of a friend of mine. That what mattered was that the book went to someone who was Awakened, not that it be returned to the blood inheritor. It's just shitty, petty snobbery, and I'm over it. Shit, Sera, you think the other one would call a woman 'girl' if she was in the Order? He wouldn't. Did you see the look on his face, looking at you and I? Like you were less than me, unworthy, filthy. It's shitty, and now I kind of want to go back there and break his nose. It's real hard to feel classy and above everyone else when you've got snot-blood pouring out of your face."
Look, there, he's all mad again.
SerafíneSera kisses him. They're facing each other and they're on a street corner, right. A straight block or two or three down from the bookstore, within clear sight of the Jag because that's not a car you ever want out of your fucking sight, and they're facing each and they've stopped walking and she's holding his hand, looking up at him, listening as he tells her how his apprenticeship ended. They're outside. It's night. There's a siren wailing in the distance, far enough away that it is merely signal noise.
And more; and her gaze is slanting upward and he can read that she's processing, somehow - however she processes ideas in her state of intoxication - however they get themselves lodged beneath her skin, to break free at the strangest of strange moment, to rise to the surface, turn over in the light. Then his tone is changing and her gaze - which is darkly luminous right? the devouring pupils reflecting the glint of the streetlights - is quick and sudden on his profile and her mouth is open and he's shaking his head. And he fucking hates Hermetics who think they're better than everyone else and by the end he kind of wants to go back there and break some noses and through it all, her hand is firm in his, her grip tight.
Then she's loosening hers from his and maybe there's a split second where he thinks -
- or no. There's no mistaking her. Sera lets go of his hand, but only so that she can reach for his face with both hands and pull his mouth down on hers.
There's something ferocious in that kiss. Quite nearly savage.
No, very nearly savage, her fingers splayed to cradle his skull, thumbs against his cheekbones. Open, devouring, hungry. The kiss is half teeth and half tongue and breathless and when she pulls away for a scissoring second just to catch her goddamned breath, she's panting. Just panting against his mouth.
Like she can never quite catch her breath when he's this close to her.
And goddamnit, Sera hates this Nefertiti chick, probably the way Hawksley hates those goddamned Hermetics who think they're better than everyone. Hates her. Hates her,
because, right here are the first two things Sera loved about Hawksley: his capacity for joy, his sense of wonder at their gleaming world, his tongue's affinity for poetry even in the most ordinary of moments, and his refusal, his refusal
to kneel
to something as elemental and universal as fucking gravity.
He is always flying in her mind.
--
So she kisses him and kisses him and kisses him; he's agitated, he's all angry again. Wants to throw a punch or two or three, wants to feel bone crack beneath his knuckles, wants to make blood-snot run and Sera kisses him not to distract him from that passion but to feel it.
She kisses him until she remembers that there are words in her throat. Until she has to break away catch her breath because she might drown in his mouth. Until she feels like she needs the stars too because he's everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, and she has to remember to breathe or she might die.
That is when she remembers everything he said; it is all swim-sliding through her mind, and she looks back at him rather than the stars, and her eyes slide from his eyes to his mouth and she wants to kiss him again. Instead, she asks him the question that nudges its way to the surface of her intoxicated mind,
"If they're all that awful, why'd you stay with them at all?"
Hawksley RothschildThrowing a book at your mentor -- Hawksley does not use the terms 'Mater' or 'Pater', if he ever did, and if he was on his knees for these people it's likely he did -- would not necessarily be enough to get you thrown out of the Order. Yes, that's right, the entire Order, not just the one house. Unless that mentor were particularly spiteful and petty, perhaps. Sera doesn't know. Sera calls them Gryffindors and Ravenclaws and knows which one Hawksley is because he told her. He got the joke, and he laughed at it.
He's not laughing now, not even close. He's annoyed, and at least some of that annoyance is at himself. Normally if someone's going to be a douchebag, he just lets them be a douchebag. But over and over and with that smarmy smile and condescending, patronizing tone, those chuckles, that insistence on ridiculous language, the persistent questioning about Hawksley just because of the Order and not because Hawksley is particularly interesting
WHICH HE TOTALLY KNOWS HE IS, THANK YOU VERY MUCH,
the way he reminded Hawksley a little bit of a creepy uncle about to feel up Grace or Sera or that other woman he doesn't really know who actually just huffed at them to calm down because they weren't presenting themselves well, which he actually did understand and which only made him want to yell at her, too --
well. He didn't laugh it off. Whether he should have or not is a matter of opinion. His opinion is that he shouldn't have been the only one saying Dude, not fucking cool. His opinion is that he was well within rights to yell at the guy. But still: he feels annoyed at himself.
And he doesn't like talking about his past. At all. That's one of the things he and Sera have in common, which is one of the reasons they get along so smashingly. But he talks about the past. It's not the worst story there is to tell, but it's not a pleasant one.
She kisses him for it. And he closes his eyes, leaning into it, leaning into her, winding his fingers through hers, pausing a moment in his aggravation. She doesn't let go of him and let him go back and punch anybody, not that she could really stop him, and not that he's really running off to do so. It's a hell of a kiss, really. She's not fucking around, and then his hand tightens, his other hand going to the small of her back, pulling her a half-step closer to him. As he does. As he always seems to.
This Hermetic, long ago, made him kneel.
He was not made to kneel.
He is the Right Eye of the Sun.
--
Hawksley ends up wrapping both arms around her back, lifting her a bit onto him, closing his eyes, deepening that kiss as it goes on, and on. The anger abates a bit, melts into the passion of another kind, blends with it into something that is not lazy or relaxed at all.
They do part, though. To breathe, among other things.
She asks him such a question. Hawksley closes his eyes again, letting her back onto her heels slowly, slowly. It's not the first time someone's asked. He looks down at her and just shrugs those heavy shoulders of his.
"I joined a different house. The Order... codified so much of what the other Traditions are still using. Gave us all a common lexicon to draw from. When you name a thing, you give it meaning and you give it power, and so many of the names that we all use commonly -- not just among our own but when we're mingled -- came in some way from the Order. The vast majority of them are dicks, but the way they approach the study and form of magic just... makes sense to me. There's a structure to it, a way to delve right to the core of something's power, while keeping an odd sort of reverence for both that power and yourself -- meeting it on equal footing, like you're entitled to it, and I think in a way we are -- that I didn't see anywhere else."
Hawksley shakes his head. "Plus, House Ex Miscellanea has got some fucked-up mages of its own. There are fairy-worshippers and former druids and all kinds of shit in Ex Miscellanea, Sera. And... they're the only ones who would take me when I got back in."
He smiles. Thinly.
SerafíneSera doesn't know. Sera doesn't know their House names, no, and knows Hawksley's only because he told her. She forgets, deliberately or -
no, there must be some degree of intention in her ignorance, her misremembering her sometimes misordered thinking, her refusal of so many received and ill-received truths. She forgets the ritual and the formality and the rigidity and perhaps the majesty of his practice until she finds him in his library on a winter afternoon-sliding-into-evening, failing sunlight from the west, the reflected glow of the seamed horizon to the east, altars, see. Velvet curtains and sweeping views and shelves to the arching ceilings and trundle ladders on tracks and: him in the center of it,
teasing out the secrets of the universe.
It is hard to look at him sometimes, with all that knowledge in her. Hard for her to see the god in the man, glorious and alien and absolutely indifferent to her. Hard to see the man in the god sometimes, but she looks and she looks and she looks.
Sometimes, she even Sees.
--
The MDMA intensifies everything; his agitation and his anger, the parabolic curve of it buffets her skin and then she's kissing him and his mouth tastes like fire and then he is pulling her closer, folding his arms around her back and lifting her a bit off the ground and oh, see -
flying again.
Her hands roam his torso. Spread out over the perfectly tapered, impeccably tailored V-neck, just over the span of his ribs and she can feel him breathing, the bellows of it, and he is a goddamned miracle, and she would know him with her eyes cloed and her ears deafened and her hands tied behind her back. She would know him by the way he feels.
She is - drifting a bit. He can see that; the way her head moves on her neck, she is remembering how her body movies and drifting, see, as if on the sea somewhere. The movement of oceanic currents quiet beneath her. Drifting but her eyes open, present, when he speaks, or perhaps when she hears something that presages the thinness of that smile.
Then she disentangled a hand and an arm and reaches up to brush her thumb over his mouth. To trace the line of that spare expression.
"I didn't know they kicked you out."
HawksleySera isn't an idiot. Her intoxication is deliberate. Her forgetfulness is deliberate. Her denials, her refusal to dig into her past when she can turn back time and find out -- all these things are deliberate, as was her fasting. Hawksley calls out what he thinks is disingenuous, fearful, pointless, but he respects the choice. Look at how angry he got at someone being so thoughtless in their disrespect of others; at least know what you're doing when you do it.
She was high when he picked her up tonight. It didn't matter to him, not really. If she's drunk or juice fasting or on Something; he trusts her to be herself, her own self, regardless of her chemical state. She is, after all, greater than himself now in the only way that means anything in the end.
So far he hasn't expressed envy. So far she hasn't seen it in him, either.
Though: let us hope no one closes her eyes and blocks her ears and ties her hands. What she will feel then is fire, not flying, as it billows through the room.
--
She touches his mouth and he doesn't kiss it or bite her or pull her hand down. He just relents, lets her, watching her, holding her against him on the sidewalk. Hawksley shrugs. "It was sort of a mutual thing," like he's discussing an old breakup with her. "Nefertiti was done with me, I was done with her and the whole damn Order, me and Kate fell apart, I came back to the States." He's still a moment, watching her.
"Does it make a difference?"
SerafíneIt was sort of a mutual thing he is telling her and her thumb is riding the shape of his mouth as he speaks. She watches not his eyes but his mouth and her thumb. Her nailpolish is dark and glossy and chipped at the rightmost edge and there is one of her tattoos, the script written in the interspace between her right thumb and index finger, which she does not remember having etched into her skin. His voice is resonant when they are this close, she can feel the rumble of it through his chest and it is perhaps absurd to be having this conversation on the sidewalk on the corner of a deserted street but the city spikes upwards all around them and the sky is open and probably a block and a half away a few of the punk-ass book jockey's other Awakened customers are starting to filter out of his shop and Sera doesn't care.
Kate.
Sera flashes him an upslanting look. Not too far up since those fucking shoes take her to quite-nearly-level with him but still up, her face cheated a bit away from him, her nose all prominent in profile, her mouth open and the remnants of her lipstick smeared to insubstantiality. Her mouth not precisely bruised, but beestung.
And no she's starting to say, it doesn't make any difference and he can read that no in her, the first intentional movement of her head to shake it and god she would shake it, a fucking one hundred eighty degree arc of motion just to feel the extremes of her range and the way she moves between them; the night air on her skin and the stars hidden beyond the edges of the night sky burning, burning.
But she arrests the motion and opens her eyes and sees herself reflected in his and half-smiles and moistens the curve of her lower lip with a flicker of her tongue.
"I guess it's better that way," something almost shy, or call it abashed because nothing about Sera is in any way retiring, except when it comes to Talking About Shit Like an Adult, where she does not excelt. "because it was your choice, but coming and going. Like an act of will."
Inhales,
and oh, that feels so lovely.
"I want you to take me somewhere," she tells him, then, eyes quick and dark on his face. A hum in the back of her throat, as she sounds out possibilities. "Anyplace you wanna go. The river, maybe."
HawksleySera has explored Hawksley enough by now to know how flawless his skin is, scalp to soles. He has no piercings. He has no tattoos. He has -- perhaps miraculously -- no vivid, storytelling scars. He is golden in summer, kissed and caressed by the sun even more than by Serafine herself. That's how she met him, up at Red Rocks, how she saw him after kayaking and when he took off his shirt before kneeling at her lap in her garden. She's covered in tattoos. Knots and sharks and triangles and sharp edges and mystery and beauty. He hasn't ever asked her about them. Truthfully, he doesn't much care about these more than he cares about her intoxication here and there. All these things are merely stepping stones.
Hawksley leans to her and kisses her, when she says Act Of Will, because it's better than words just then. He kisses her with his hands pressing at her lower back, holding her to him, so that when they part and she tells him that she wants him to take her somewhere, anyplace, maybe the river, it does not seem at all a surprise.
Oh, he aches a bit when she says that, the river, like she can see it in his eyes. He lowers his brow to her brow, and one of his hands slides up and buries itself in all that thick long hair of hers. They are not going to Talk About Shit Like Adults, because though he has perhaps a bit more skill in this area than she does, neither of them go there very willingly. Hawksley tends to just break things when he gets there.
And he nods against her, rolling their foreheads together in a yogic or an animal gesture. "Do you remember," he asks quietly, "the night you told me your other name? It was before your fast."
And he wanted her so badly then, and she wanted him so badly, and she was more drunk than he'd ever seen her, and he took her home, and he never regretted it but oh, he sank his teeth into the irony.
SerafíneSera inhales again. She inhales into and inside the kiss; steals some of the breath from his lungs, arches her body into his even as he is pressing them together, as if they were - the two of them - defined by the a rising, valent spiral that just might continue until they were, the both of them, just rising from the goddamned ground because who gives a shit about gravity. And she has hands splayed open over his ribs because those fucking muscles, the ripple like water with every movement, the promising torsion of his obliques, like she even knows their names, but then he's kissing her again and she's reaching for him, to wrap her arms around his neck and settle her elbows on his shoulders and hold the fuck on and hold him against her and hold him,
and hold him,
and hold him.
Her own hands have crept into his hair even as he buries his hand in hers and they are brow to brow and it feels so perfect. The entirety of the world narrowed down to her view of him, which is so distorted by proximity (and, to be honest, drugs) that there is no reconciling the information of the right and left eyes, so her brain layers them like a second-rate Picasso, piecemeal, and that's fine with her.
She wants to kiss him again and so she does. This one is tender for the ache in his voice, tender for the slow and steady roll of his forehead against hers, how close they are and how much she loves that, and he asks her if she remembers the river when she told him her other name and she inhales like that should hurt - the other name - but it doesn't, or at least it doesn't in his mouth, it just feels quick and tender and that's fine. That's fine.
That's how we're made.
Sera does not want to break any of the myriad points of contact between their bodies so her gestures are all cradled against him and defined by these fulcrum points,
"We were in a boat," she's telling him, smiling against his mouth. They were not in a boat. "It was so fucking warm. The water low and rippling with reflection and your arms around me, and I remember your beating heart and how I could taste it in my throat and feel it in my fingertips and the and there was sand beneath my thighs.
"I wanted you so much. Didn't even know how I wanted you. Just that I wanted you. Sometimes it feels like, there are pieces of my fucking body that didn't know how to exist until you touched me there. With your mouth or your hands -
"I don't remember what we did with the boat, after. Or where I'd been or how I got home. Just my spine against your chest. How right that felt."
HawksleyNot her real name. Not her true name. Not her birth name. Just 'other'. Just another name that belongs to her, or was once put upon her and attached to her and stained by her existence within it. He remembers it. She knows much of his name now, though not all of it. Enough to be a danger, not enough to be his undoing.
He licks his lips, and hers, because they are still kissing when he does that. They are breathing the same breath, brief and warm and humid in the winter that is starting to remember how to be spring, and he's thinking now of taking her to the river, he's thinking of her admitting that her shoes hurt her feet, her little white dress, her body atop his, the way giving her up that night of all nights felt like having something torn from him, and how
in some ways, he is glad she fasted after that. He's not sure what would have become of him if he hadn't had some time to simply regain himself.
--
This time they are kissing tenderly and he is grateful for that; tries to tell her while kissing, with kissing, that he is thankful. He wants to lift her up and around him but he doesn't, doesn't come up with a reason not to but simply: doesn't.
And she talks about a boat and he's like um, okay in his head, letting his eyes open, watching her from up close, yes, Picasso-esque, and why shouldn't he buy one, he thinks, but then he refocuses.
Sometimes it feels like
my body
didn't know how to exist
until you touched me
"We weren't in a boat," he corrects her, because he would. He cradles her scalp in his broad, long-fingered hand, tips his head to her neck and kisses her there, against her pulse, right under her jaw. "The rest seems about right, though," Hawksley adds, because he is a cocky motherfucker.
Of course she wanted him, so much. And it was warm, and his arms were around her, and his heart beat and there was sand and he touched her with his mouth, his hands, of course he took her home. Back then it was not of course; they had not known each other close-to-a-year-now at that point. They barely knew each other at all, before all this.
His lips move against her throat.
"Let's go to your place."
SerafíneHis mouth finds her throat, finds her pulse, finds the pounding thread of it and she tips her head back. This is an offering. She tips her head back and her eyes are open and her arms are around his neck, one hand now loose, now firm in his hair because sometimes there are pieces and parcels of his tenderness that she almost cannot bear. Or ways that he moves that she does not want him to stop. Or -
or or or -
and she's smiling, making noises, see, the way she does, because MDMA. Because Hawksley, because mouth-and-skin, because of the way her ribs feel like they need to crack for all the light she's letting in; because there are stars and the stars are in her skull and beneath her tongue and the sometimes they threaten to splint her open, tear her all asunder, all that fucking light.
He corrects her and she laughs and he can feel the bunch and curve of her throat with the laughter and it's low and she corrects him back and she's wrong but not in her mind. " - it was a boat;" she insists, all fond. "We were - drifting. There was a current, I could feel it underneath us. The way it moved.
"They take you fucking places, you know?"
--
He thinks about picking her up, wrapping her around him. She would like it if he did. But this is fine too, the warm pressure of his hand against the small of her back, steady but not insistent. The familiar way his mouth moves against her throat.
Let's go to your place, he tells her. And,
"Come home with me, Hawksley,"
Sera tells him.
"Come spend the night."
HawksleyWithout thought, he recognizes it as an offering. It may as well be burning on an altar for him, the sight and scent of her throat. She may as well be a virgin or a lamb or the choicest of crops, the fragrant herbs, the burning flowers: the loveliest and most precious, laid out and given over in adoration. This does not inherently excite him, as though it were novel and unexpected. This does not endear him or make him tender, as though he thought for a moment that he were undeserving. He leans into her, kissing her neck and flicking his tongue over the taste of her skin, as though this were his due; as though he knows that this is a pact between them, whatever he is and whatever she is.
What is created must then be offered, what is offered must then be taken, what is taken must be returned,
to be created again, offered again, taken again.
--
She insists it was a goddamn boat, which is ridiculous. But she is speaking metaphorically, which is the same thing as speaking literally for many mages, especially those of her tradition -- at least from what he's gleaned. A moment ago he was talking about fairy-worshippers, after all.
"I know," he tells her, drawing his mouth away from her, touching her face with his hands, smoothing back her hair.
--
What she says, past that, makes him smile. Warm and not godlike at all, not inhuman, not angry as before. The anger has left him, has been forgotten, because it -- like those who cause it -- don't matter much to him in the long run.
"Well, duh," he says, because really: that was the plan all along. "We'll tumble into bed and stay up all night and sleep and wake up and make potatoes and get your friends to come snuggle and take a shower in your ridiculously tiny bathroom,"
says the man whose house has seventeen of the things, and one that is larger than her bedroom.
He kisses her again, quick and soft on her mouth, smiling.
Serafíne"I love you." Sera tells him then; simply and without ornament, and she doesn't fucking understand that the words are going to come out of her damned mouth until they do, and then they do and they're quick in her throat and in her chest, and she says them without expectation of reciprocation and she says them because she can't not say them, not after he says Well, duh like that and lays out their night and their morning and their afternoon so thoroughly and so precisely.
Because he kisses her, afterwards, quick and soft on her mouth.
Because he smiles.
Because.
She tells him that because in that precisely moment crossed with a half-hundred other moments she cnanot not tell him; she has to tell him; and even Sera is surprised by the words but she feels them also inside her as a kind of conviction that she's known for a lifetime or maybe lifetimes and that, also, makes her smile.
Here's a truth: Sera does not wait. She does not wait for some reciprocal pledge, for some ritualized exchange of tenderness. She has all the tenderness she requires in the warm pressure of his mouth against her mouth, and she does not give a fuck about reciprocity.
Her hands drop from his face and his skull to take his hand.
"Cmon," she's telling him, tugging him along. "Let's go home."
HawksleyThat is not an offering. Not a jewel or a calf, not something burning heady smoke into the noonday sun. That, he doesn't take as his due, accept as part of an endless cycle between differing souls on differing planes that are all, in the end, connected by essence. That arrests him, presses his heart against the firmity of his breastbone and holds it there, tight and a--
hurting, actually.
There's expectation on Sera's end, and in fact she has no intention of waiting, of letting the words hang in the air to suggest that she's waiting for something when she's not, nope, nope, not her, no sir, she doesn't give a fuck about such things, but Hawksley is not her, and Hawksley cannot move for a moment, or breathe, or name what it is that stops him from moving, from breathing, from naming.
She has gotten to C'mo-- when his hands, still on her face, draw her to kiss him again. Not like the soft peck on her mouth from a moment ago, nothing of the kind. The way he kisses her now is like a storm coming on, the sort that rises up sudden and torrential in summer, throwing itself across the face of the earth with thunder, with light crackling across the sky and skin, with flash floods destroying the landscape. He kisses her hard, pulling the breath out of her lungs, eating at her mouth with a savagery that it is so easy to forget he has,
is made of.
For a moment in that kiss it may seem like they aren't going to make it back up the sidewalk to his car, or back to her house, which is closer than his from where they stand right now anyway. For a moment it seems that he's just going to lift her up onto his body, putting her back against a shop wall or a lamppost, the way he's pulling at her, holding her, pressed to her, kissing her until even his breathing seems starved, ravenous,
oddly satisifed, already.
But the only reason Hawksley stops kissing her is to breathe. To pant, really, his brow on hers, and she's not waiting and he's not capable and so he says nothing at all while someone or someones in the heavens scream WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU at him. He just breathes like he's been pulled up from near-drowning.
--
Some time after that they do make it back to the Jaguar. They do drive back, the night air growing shockingly, searingly cold as the sun abandons them entirely. Hawksley drives with one hand on the wheel, one hand holding hers with fingers laced, letting go only to change gears when necessary. They do go to the house on Corona, and into the back alley where he can pull his car into hiding darkness in the detached, shed-like garage of Dee's house. They do kiss again in that shed-like garage, in the darkness with the door behind them still open, leaning into each other in those creamy leather seats.
They do fuck out there, in the passenger seat which does not recline and does not move back, Hawksley slouching down and Sera open atop him. They can barely see each other in the shadows and yet all the same he does bury his face against her breasts, her throat, holding her closer than he needs to, his discarded t-shirt hanging across the low windshield behind her. When he comes he's bellowing, swearing, when his voice can actually form words, fuck,
Jesus, fuck --!
He bangs his knee against the glovebox at some point. There is laughter, breathy and unwinding, long before he can move again. There is a long while spent in the car, holding her against his chest, her hair over his shoulder and his arm, running his hand over her back, not wanting to take her inside, where there's Dan and Dee and Rick and anyone else. Not yet. Not for any reason he names.
Eventually they go. Even though it's cold he doesn't put his shirt back on, though he does pull his jeans up, buttons, doesn't bother re-fastening his belt, it's not like anyone inside was unaware of the car pulling up, pulling in, how long it took them to come inside, the noises they heard. Eventually they end up in her bed, and this time he wants her naked and says so, whispering it against her skin that I want you naked, pulling items off with his teeth because his hands are otherwise engaged. Eventually, sometime, he ends up with her legs over his shoulders, and he stays there for quite some time.
Eventually he says he's going to sleep for like ten minutes, tops, I swear which is actually something like four hours, and if he wakes up with Dee and Sera and Dan or some other arrangement in bed with him he's perfectly content about it, but he keeps coming back to Sera, touching Sera, sliding his arms around her and burying his face against the back of her neck because of the way she smells or the way she feels or the way
maybe
she said she feels.
And if there were anything to reciprocate, any truth to say, anything he cannot not tell her,
it never gets there. He can name it. But not aloud.
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