Another night.

Serafíne

Late enough that the after-work crowd has long since gotten tipsy and gone home or gotten drunk and moved on to someplace where the drinks are cheaper and the crowd thicker, early enough that the second shift is still humming in that golden moment between dinner and midnight; before anyone has started putting down the drinks that they will regret in the morning. A bit of a lull, though on a Friday night there is never a lull in a place like Williams and Graham.

Here is someone in the crowd, at the bar, alone for the moment and deliberately so, though there must be someone or someones or many someones in and around the crowd that she knows. Seated on a barstool, one arm braced across the bar in front of her. The other elbow planted too, her tattooed fingers near-elegant in the way they drape over the mouth of her glass. A Long Live the Queen, frothy from the shaken-up egg white.

Protein, see. She calls it dinner.

The impression one might have of her from behind - blond curls half-way down her back, a skin-tight cocktail dress, legs tucked beneath the bar and shadowed from view - is not much different from the other female patrons on a Friday night.

But oh, the way she feels.

Ian Lai

Williams and Graham was exactly the kind of trendy bar one might expect to find in Denver. Modeled nostalgically after an old-fashioned speakeasy, but with a kind of shimmer and polish that felt all-too clean and new to really fool anyone into forgetting that they were in an upscale establishment. The room had a lush, golden glow that set off warm, coppery tones in the wooden furniture.

The crowd here tonight, neither as busy as it had been or as it would be later (but still lively for a friday evening,) was mostly a mix of young hipsters and older, educated clientele.

And then of course, there was Serafine, who seemed to exist in a category all her own. The Awakened were good at that. Sera, especially, was good at that.

Ian wasn't bad at it either.

When he walked into the room, a few people looked up. It was easy to look at him, and easier still to keep looking once you'd started. Where Sera's beauty was raw and visceral, Ian's was sleek and alluring. Feline. The Sleepers noticed it without really understanding what it was they were sensing, but Sera would know. She'd feel the predator under his skin as surely as she'd sense the resonance (cunning and elegant) swirling around him. He was dressed in dark selvage jeans (skinny and tailored,) black harness boots and a crisp white t-shirt. The kind of casual but clearly-overpriced outfit that one might expect of someone who was probably going to be out dancing later.

Ian paused at the far end of the bar, gazing across at where Sera was seated with her drink. After a moment, he approached and took a seat to her left.

But he didn't say hello. Just glanced at her and cocked an eyebrow in a wry smile steeped in subtext. When the bartender asked what he wanted to drink, he asked for Sazerac.

Ian Lai

[I suppose I should roll some awareness, huh?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne

Sera wants a cigarette. Sera wants a fucking cigarette but they don't let you smoke anywhere, anymore. So she's sitting at the bar with her hand open over her drink and her index and forefingers just parted as if there were indeed a clove cigarette between them although there is not, and when Ian comes up and takes that seat at her left, well, he has the impression of blond curls still soft against the sharper edge of her profile. He has the background punch of her resonance, which is impossible to miss or ignore, aswirl all around her. Tonight she feels more like - what it is? Passageways; thresholds. Something between or just on the verge of becoming. Liminal, like holding your tongue against the roof of your mouth, just

waiting

for something more.

Ian sits down beside her; she sees his shadow before she sees him.

The way it cuts across the bar.

Sera is aware of him and visibly so; something about the supple flow of tension across her skin. Something about the pattern of her breathing, the arc of her spine. Aware of him and evidently so, but she does not look at him for

several

long

beats

of her errant heart. And then she does; a slanting sideglance that takes in his profile, travels down his frame to the drink that has just been placed in front of him. The right side of her head is shaved.

It is almost surprising, how spare her gaze is, tonight.

"I don't think we've met."

Ian Lai

"No." He smiled again and took a sip of his drink. His tongue ran between his lips (thoughtful, tasting.) "I can go, if you'd rather be alone." The cast of his voice and his dark, sloped eyes gave the impression of honesty when he said this. Maybe that was only an acknowledgment of Sera's capabilities, or maybe it was actual courtesy. Either way, if she wanted him to go, he would.

When Ian leaned over the bar, it stretched the muscles in his back, coiling for a moment as he rolled his shoulders before settling into a relaxed pose. He had a lean build, thin but athletic. The denim fabric of his tailored jeans hugged his legs tightly enough that you could see the outline of corded muscles in his thighs.

(Some kind of athlete?)

"Either way, I like your dress. And your tattoos."

Serafíne

Sera makes some noise in the back of her throat, and the slow-crawl of her mouth is wry. One doesn't, one imagines, come to a place like this dressed like that if one wants to be alone. But here she is; dressed like that, drinking, and spare somehow, and alone.

She does not tell him to go.

Just gives him that look that has the shape of a smirk though not all of its implications. Chin hair, the long curls falling back from the sharp tracery of her profile, her eyes half-shadowed, her mouth seamed. Smiling, though somehow it looks like she's smiling (all smirking-wry) around something.

"Which tattoos do you like best?" She asks, gaze sparking on his features. Steady. And for all that sense of attenuation about her, confident as fucking hell. She's magic, after all.

"The ones you see now? Or the ones you can't see, yet?"

Ian Lai

There was a bit of like-minded recognition in the way that Ian's lips kept tugging at the corners, edgy little half-smiles that never fully broke open. Recognition because they both knew this game like it was written into their bones. And maybe Ian had been drawn to her because they were both Awake, but maybe it was also because he'd been around enough people to know when someone might be worth talking to.

"Ask me again later tonight. Maybe I'll like them all."

He took a drink of his whiskey and set the glass down, rolling it once, lightly, between his thumb and middle finger. His eyes only strayed from hers long enough that his attention wouldn't seem uncomfortably direct, before alighting back on the striking angles of her face.

"I'm Ian."

Serafíne

"Most people do," she returns, with such easy equanimity that it feels like a statement of - well, fact. There is something quite nearly unprepossessing about the way she says those three words, though Sera cannot ever be truly unprepossessing. She may be the most fucking possessing, and prepossessing, person in the goddamned bar.

But her body language shifts slightly; doesn't it? She turns on the barstool, unlaces her right hand from where it drifts over her drink. The long fingers framed with tattoos. He does not get a glimpse of sharkscissors yet; that is on the left palm, but the right has its own ink and its own history she does not remember.

Sera is wearing a black leather bracelet ringed with spikes and bicycle chain wrapped five times around her right wrist by way of jewelry. A bronze ring on her right index finger, its shield face engraved with ... well, something he is too far to read.

"Serafíne. Call me Sera.

"New in town?"

Ian Lai

He could have made a similar claim, had he any tattoos to show (or hide.)

"Mm, not so much new as... on the fringes." He glanced at her bracelets - the way they stuck out (the way they moved against her skin.) His own wrist (not the one closest to Sera but the far one - the left hand) was decorated with a simple band made of leather and steel.

"You?"

He took a drink while she answered, listening with measured interest. And soon enough his angle adjusted to match hers, drawing their knees closer together. That he wanted to touch her was more than obvious, but then, he hadn't made any effort to hide it. Ian was young and beautiful and in alone (no longer) in a bar on a Friday night. More than likely this precise sort of interaction had been in the cards all along. If Sera had not been here, he'd probably be drinking with someone else by now.

That didn't make his interest any less genuine, though.

[And while we're at it, let's do an empathy roll.]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Ian Lai

[Edit: and alone (no longer)]

Serafíne

"No." Sera replied, swaying slightly in his direction as she reaches to pull her own drink - the froth from the shaken egg white has started to collapse upon itself - closer to hand. That half-smile still curls like smoke at the edge of her mouth, but the truth is that it does not entirely reach her eyes. "I've been here a while."

The truth is that Ian can see that smile and see through it; he can see also that her interest is piqued, though it does not seem to have the same inflections as his interest, it is still there, in her eyes and beneath her skin.

There is also something about the way she holds herself; a certain care, a certain guardedness, as if she were protecting from a healing wound; as if she were a healing wound; as if this were her first night out in a half-dozen days and she were remember the shape of the glass in her hand and the murmur of the patrons in the crowd and the way the music hums and the traffic outside flashes by; the blast of warmth from the heater and the pleasure of a stranger taking the seat beside you, is this free.

"Why stay on the fringes, though? Why not plunge the fuck in?"

Ian Lai

She asked for elaboration, and for once, Ian gave a straight-forward answer (and although it was not the whole answer, it was a truthful one.)

"Honestly? I work two jobs and one of them requires travel. I just... haven't had the time."

There was a subtle shift in his energy as they spoke - a gradual thing that softened the sharp edges of his interest. He let his drink rest a moment, less focused on it than he was on her, and for a few beats he sat very still. Then he moved, twisting around to face her fully, and let the fingers of his left hand slide along the bar until they came to rest beside her own where they gripped her glass.

"Clearly I should have, though."

And he left it at that. Did not press to ask her to talk about whatever it was that was still hanging onto her body - ghosts of old wounds that might never really go away. It was as close to empathy as he usually came. And then, if she let him, his fingers found their way to hers and he traced a slow line up the length of her middle finger and onto the back of her hand.

"I was going to ask if you wanted to go dancing, but... maybe another night."

Serafíne

His hand comes to rest beside her own, and Sera's gaze falls from Ian to his hand. The scintillating glimmer of light over the rim of her glass, the dull thread of reflection in the beaten copper ring on her index finger. The ink worked into her skin, black and gray and only that, narrow lines, the letters and numbers somehow compressed and elongated by the artist such that they are both unmistakeably scribed, and impossible to read without close examination.

She is in a three-quarter profile to him and cuts him a slicing little glance when he makes that remark, that clearly I should have plunged the fuck in sooner, and that makes the edge of her small smirk deepen into something else entirely. Some remarkable sort of knowingness that is written wholly and entirely into her skin.

Then he touches her, and she does allow it, drops her gaze to watch him follow that line up her middle finger to her wrist. Thinks, briefly and wholly, of someone else entirely, and holds that thought in her body and in her lungs and breathes out and turns her hand over so that he has her palm, her inner wrist, the branching delicacy of her veins to admire beneath her skin. Paler at the inner wrist than anywhere else.

"Another time. I don't know that I'm so much the going dancing sort though. I prefer a good dive bar to a goddamned nightclub.

"You seem pretty polished. You really think you can get that dirty?"

Ian Lai

He took a certain patient appreciation in the contact of skin where his finger met her hand, and maybe Sera would see it in the way his eyes lingered there (in the soft-focus gleam of his gaze.) Her pattern was alive and vivid beside him, if a bit guarded (liminal.) She asked if he was capable of getting dirty.

"I don't get dirty," he responded. "It's one of my gifts. My sweat smells like cinnamon and rose petals." At that, he gave a playful loft of an eyebrow (obviously joking, though he kept his voice dead-pan.) He lifted his hand away from hers slowly and picked up his whiskey, finishing off the last of it in one go. There was a brief gesture given to the bartender to indicate he was ready to retrieve his credit card.

"Is that a challenge? Because I have to warn you, I'm not planning to go to sleep until dawn."

Serafíne

"It's a fact," Sera, quietly. Her eyes are dark in this light and they cut down and away from his, to some point against or just beyond the edge of the bar. Her mouth is open, lips glossed rather than painted, her eyes dark and rimmed with kohl, smeared at the edges a bit. There is a peculiar light in her eyes and a certain delicacy in the way she holds her chin, some memory like a lozenge in the center of her tongue. " - not a challenge."

And her smile: spare and strange and quick. The needlepoint of it, a pinprick loveliness that feels both immediate and wrenching and distant and haloed.

"It's who I am. Not a fucking game."

And she stands up abruptly enough that she pushes the barstool back with her ass and if this were really an old speakeasy rather than a sleekly modern incarnation of one the barstool would be caught on some rought floorboard and upended, but instead it just glides.

Sera is standing close to him; breathing in, her senses wide open, her heart beating, beating, in her chest. Her own drink is only half-finished but she doesn't down it, not the way you think. Not all-at-once. Not at all. Sera's heels are insane but not quite insane enough to bring him up to Ian's full height. If he's perched on a barstool though, maybe -

"I like the scent of sweat. Sawdust. That three a.m. panic that down's never going to come and that five a.m. panic that it's just around the goddamned corner. Every goddamned puzzle piece in between." "I get dirty as hell. It doesn't sound like you'd really like that." Sera's appreciation is never really patient, is it? Is never deliberated. It simply is. "And I don't know any other way to be."

Serafíne

Per + Awarempathy.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Ian Lai

[Manip+Subterfuge]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 3 )

Ian Lai

It's who I am. Not a fucking game.

Ian didn't respond to that - at least not verbally. His expression was, like much of the rest of him, controlled. But there was an edge of... something. Less in the details of his eyes and more in the way he stared at her with this kind of calm, coiled focus. More feline in that moment than she'd seen of him so far.

The sound of the barstool scraping against the floor as it was pushed back drew his gaze briefly (but only briefly.)

Sera's energy was a burning heat beside him, the way she stood so close, a vision of raw nerves and brutal honesty. Ian let her speak. Then he stood, and the motion was both smooth (graceful in a way that made him almost otherworldly) and, yes, deliberate.

Because Ian was a person who never did a single fucking thing without making damn sure that it was something he wanted to do.

And then he leaned in (close enough that his breath touched the sensitive cartilage of Sera's ear) and said, "You don't know a single fucking thing about me."

He pocketed his credit card.

Then he left. And unless Sera made an attempt to stop him, his departure would be as smooth and silent as his entrance had been.