Sings. Sleeps.

Kalen Holliday

Kalen is in the bedroom downstairs at the chantry where Pan stayed once and where he brought the box of bones wrapped in Sera's shirt and whatever scraps of fabric they could find that were not dissolving. Pan and Adam want him to sleep, tried to soothe and calm and he let them.

He isn't asleep yet though. He is thinking about them. About Alyssa. About an Archmage who is both dead and alive in a curious way he cannot define or explain in The Message.

And so he is still and quiet, but very much awake. The candles are out and the myrrh is not burning, though its scent lingers in the air, mingled with the scent of sweet red wine and very old dust.

Serafíne

God knows where Sera wandered to when she left them to their vigil and their prayers. She knows the prayers but does not pray them. She does not believe in the gods they know; she remembers Him differently. She believes in His believers, though.

She was somewhere in the house, perhaps on a couch, perhaps curled up on a patio chair she pulled up to the edge of the flagstones framing in the steaming pool of the hotspring where the node rises and probably she toed off her boots and unhooked her stockings from her garters and slide off the chair onto the rocks and slipped her feet into the waters and fell asleep for a time at the water's edge with her head pillowed on the bulk of the leather jacket temporarily stolen from Denver's newest Apprentice, who is Not Even a Week Old.

Now it is later; she's woken up. The moon is glowing in the velvet darkness and the warmth of the day has fled and the stars have wheeled half-way across the sky and she's still spent but this isn't simply or merely a physical exhaustion. So she straightens and finds again her bottle of tequila and leaves her boots tumbled against the patio doors but picks up her stockings for god knows what reason and also the jacket and holds the bottle by its neck as she wanders inside.

She doesn't have far to go.

Inside, downstairs. Legs still so hot from the spring that wisps of steam lick off her skin in the faintly chilly air. The day was warm enough that someone turned turned off the furnace. The night is a reminder that spring has not yet truly come.

Thump thump thump.

That's how she knocks. The weighted bottom of the tequila bottle against the door.

Kalen Holliday

Kalen's eyes open at the knocking and he smiles faintly. "Come in," he says, quiet but definitely not sounding as if she woke him. He is in the process of moving over so there is space on the bed and half propping himself up on his elbows. If Sera wants something more formal, she's going to have to give him a minute.

And then, warmer but still quiet when she opens the door, "Hey. Some day, huh?"

Serafíne

The door swings open and there she is, the tequila bottle still lightly held in her right hand. Stockings in her left, garters swinging loose against her thighs. The candles are out so it's dark in here; except perhaps for the moonlight washing in through the windows if he has not yet drawn the blinds. Hardly matters, Sera is backlit by the light from the hallway, and the house has that deep and abiding quiet that seems to settle into places where people live and places where people sleep in the dead of night.

Sera sort of swings into the room, using the doorjam and her shoulder joint as the strangest of fulcrums and that motion seems quite drunk but she's not really; not precisely drunk. Not now, not yet.

Still, she lifts the bottle in a toast as she wanders in and takes a swig and then another and then the edge of the bed is sinking a bit beneath her weight.

"Yeah." Sera says, all quiet. Surprisingly, meditatively quiet, as she holds out the bottle of tequila. There's no salt and there's no lime but some people just lick there own skin to make the liquor sing. "It was some day. Really the strangest pair of them, you know?

"You gonna be okay?"

Kalen Holliday

"I'll be fine. I was maybe not entirely prepared for being dragged into the Umbra and meeting a Sending that was partly a dead man and partly fragments of other souls." He smiles a little, perhaps invisible in the near-darkness, but he pauses slightly to do it.

"But, shhhhhhh.... You can't tell anyone. You know how it is with the Flambeau. Headlong into adventure, no concern for mortality." He is teasing, judging by the warmth and the amusement.

"You?"

Serafíne

"I'm good." Sera returns, her voice is quiet and laced with sleep and wrapped up in a certain laziness that is deeply felt and physical and also: good. She inhales deeply through her nostrils, lifting her shoulders and opening her small frame up with the gesture and: she is. Good.

There's sorrow in her voice; the thread of it not-quite-golden, more burnished, the color of sunset seen through a rear-view mirror, blazing against a receding horizon. Empathy too; in her eyes, which are difficult to see in the darkness. In the quiet surety of her voice. "Better than I've been in a long time."

And that sounds like a confession, or perhaps a revelation.

"I don't really know how it is with Flambeau, though." She is smiling back; he can hear it in the shape of her voice even if he cannot see the curve of her mouth.

" - All I fucking know about you guys is comes from Hawksley and Harry Potter, and probably not in that order. I'm pretty okay with sorrow, you know? Letting myself feel it; sometimes I cry just because it's raining and I miss the goddamned sun."

Sera makes a noise beneath her breath; the edge of a laugh that is never quite born. Then shifts. Takes another pull from her bottle of tequila. Lets it burn. "It's weirdly poetic that Alexander got to come along too, you know? Like some fucking cycle or some shit."

Kalen Holliday

"Well...I don't know how well Hawksley represents the House, but I am reading Harry Potter and while that might not be the most accurate comparison, it is definitely not the least accurate comparison." He smiles again, pushes up further so he is more upright against the wall. "I believe I described it to Grace as House Adrenaline Junky."

"That kind of emotional expression is...largely alien to me. I know someone who does that more. Sometimes you remind me of her. Except that you seem more like fire and she seems more like the ocean. Still...similar sometimes."

"It was good that he was there, yes. Poetic,perhaps. Weird...I don't think much is weird anymore. Fate does as fate does."

Serafíne

Kalen's sitting upright, more or less. Sera draws her bare legs up beneath her, settling more fully onto the stretch of bed Kalen vacated for her, leans to the side bit, bracing her weight on her right palm, extending the tequila bottle to him with her left once more, now that he's upright and can take the bottle and take a swig or two or seventeen.

If he likes, they'll share the bottle from there on hour.

"House Adrenaline Junkie." Sera echoes; muses with a little lilt of her chin and a briefly slanting glance away from Kalen, her profile a sharpened shadow against the gloom. Something keen and quixotic about what is visible of her expression in the darkness, like she's listening to some ineffable song no one else can quite remember.

When she looks back at him, her eyes are quick. Luminous in the dark.

"You don't sleep well, do you?"

Kalen Holliday

Kalen accepts the tequila bottle, takes a drink of it, and offers it back to Sera. "It makes for an easy, if rather simplified explanation."

He watches her move, studies what he can make out of her face in the dark. He is not entirely prepared for her eyes.

Or perhaps he is not quite prepared for her question. "No," he says, and while still calm there is just a touch of something clipped.

Serafíne

"I can help."

Her voice is steady and gentle and almost uninflected, although there is something beneath it. Some essential instinct; something that seems tinged with the resonance of her magics and the way she changes and reforms the molecules of the air around her.

The smallest of shrugs; so minor that it is not really visible, although perhaps Kalen can hear the creak of the leather over her shoulders and guess at it. Such a simple gesture, too often associated with surrender. Here it is something else, the smallest sort of offertory hymn.

"If you'd like me to. Give you a taste of the peace you helped give to him."

And she takes back the bottle of tequila, does Sera, and she takes another swig.

Kalen Holliday

She is exhausted. She is like some burning thing. A phoenix. A star.

She cannot imagine what it would be like to navigate by stars. Looking at her right now, he could tell her how easy that would be.

"I think that was more you," he says softly. "I couldn't have done that."

If she was someone else, he would tell her to wait. But she is only a creature of whatever moment she's setting alight. Whatever place she is slipping through into something else. She is not for waiting or for caution. Possibly not for reason. And so he says, "Please."

Serafíne

(Just rolling to make sure my post is right. Mind 2: soothe nightmares -1 (resonance appropriate) -1 (hella practiced))

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (7, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne

Extending. +1 difficulty. -1 for taking time. Hey, she has all night.

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (6, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne

Extending. Ditto.

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 2, 4) ( success x 1 )

Serafíne

He avers that he couldn't have done what she did. She says nothing, but her silence is not assent and he can feel that in the fucking air around her.

A few more swigs from the bottle of tequila, and they exchange these in a kind of reverent quiet that does not touch on silence. The room is not silent. The house is not silent. Not even the stars, in some bright and distant sphere, are silent.

"Lie down," she says eventually; quietly; assuredly. She's uncurling her legs, rising, but only so that she can settle again perched on the edge of the mattress close to the headboard and look down at him in the darkness.

This is how Sera chases away Kalen's nightmares:

she sings.

Her voice is low and voice from tequila and cigarettes and too many days and too much magic and too little sleep and lovely and immediate and rich and quiet. The magic is wrapped up in the melody and in the tangled skein of her voice; in the pattern of her breath and the way she catches it - sometimes between phrases, sometimes mid-word, always at an apex, at a place where something changes into something else.

That's it.

That's all.

She sings.

He sleeps.