Sera made it no more than half-way down the staircase to the library tucked in the chantry's basement the first go-round. This time, there is no one about to offer her a hand as she negotiates the stairs, drunk or stoned and wearing those heels. But isn't she always drunk or stoned and in those heels. And doesn't she remember the blood Grace dreams of every night.
And weren't those screams sobering.
--
A hand on the door. She's swaying a bit, but -
"Grace?"
GraceGrace hugs her knees to chest. She rocks herself slowly back and forth on the couch in the library, eyes open. It's quiet now, no screams, but she can feel them coming. Inexorable. Like the swells before a tidal wave, the blood-filled visions of Hydra have started to come. And go. And come again, worse.
Right now, she's hugging her knees to her chest because the floor has turned red and started to swim. And like some child's game of The Floor is Lava, she's certain that if she just doesn't touch it, it'll be okay. For a few minutes more.
There's a voice at the door. Sera's voice. Grace isn't entirely certain that it's the real Sera and not some fake vision-Sera come to torment her (or to die with her) but Kalen was supposed to bring Sera, wasn't he? Surely, this is the real one. If not, there's no one down here anymore to care about her talking to things that don't exist.
"Yeah? Come in?"
Serafíne"Hi Grace."
The door opens.
The door closes behind her.
Sera somewhere and somewhen between the door and the section of the library Grace occupies - sunk to the floor or perhaps one of the armchairs, knees pulled up firmly to her chest - Sera steps out of her heels. One and then the other. She remembers how to do that, how to leave things behind. If Grace is curled up in an armchair, well, Sera tucks herself into the right arm and braces her swaying-self with an outflung hand planted against the spine of the chair. If Grace is curled up on the carpet, Sera folds herself to the ground. Without the heels - which Sera wears with a fuck-you sort of confidence - she is really rather small.
Skin and bones and a beating, furious heart.
"Waking nightmares, huh?" Sera inhales. The library seems so close and sharp, suddenly. Those controls at the entrance almost - clinical. "Tell me what you feel. Okay?
"Tell me what you see. Whatever it is, I can take it."
GraceGrace puts her head in between her knees, looks down into the darkness so created by her crumpled self. "Right now? I see you. You just sloshed through all the blood on the floor," she says, waves a hand at all the blood. Her voice is still scarred a bit from all that screaming, but some of the wavering in it isn't from simply wearing out her vocal cords.
"I feel like..." she starts, but the need to breathe crowds out words. So she takes a few quick (too quick) breaths before continuing. "Like it's not safe being awake anymore. I always knew if I was awake, the dreams were over and I could just...
"Am I going to stay like this?"
Serafíne"I can't make the hallucinations go away," Sera tells Grace quietly, with a certain degree of authority threaded through her smeary voice. "Right now, you're just going to have to weather them. You're going to have to bear them with me. It's like a bad trip, see.
"You just need to get through it.
"I'm going to make you feel safe. Safe and sound, and I'm going to take away your fear. Okay?
"Then I'm going to help you sleep. And I'll stay with you all night long, 'til you wake.
"I know someone who can help if you're still see things then. Okay?
"Now stretch out; lay down. Get comfortable so you can sleep. I'm going to lie down with you."
GraceSera says she can't make the hallucinations go away, and Grace shuts her eyes tight. Well, fuck. It's like a bad trip, but Grace has never had a bad trip, really.
She doesn't want to look at Sera. Doesn't want Sera to see the fear in her. She's going to die again. Soon.
But then, Sera continues. There's things that can be done. Grace can be soothed, can be assisted, can be taken to someone with the ability to fix it.
"Okay," she says, into the jean material of her pant leg.
Sera says to lay down, and she's just contemplating the motions that will bring her there, when Sera says she's going to lie down too. Grace's hands unclasp from around her legs, stiff with tension, shaky. "You're what?"
Even so, Grace does start to stretch out on the couch, stiff and hesitant. She isn't saying no.
Serafíne"I'm gonna lay down with you."
Easy to smell the smoke in Serafíne's hair, all rich and sweet and spicy. Easy to catch the scent of the whiskey on her breath and her skin. Sera is perched on the arm of the couch and her posture is almost negligent. She is all long arms and long legs, this physical ease to her even when she's drunk enough that stairs are treacherous without railings, and the world is starting to unsluice itself all around her.
Her eyes are dark and spare and quiet and settle on Grace, who is all stiff, stark with fear, hesitant.
"Nothing's going to come for you while I'm here. I know you're afraid; I can taste it in the back of my throat. It's okay to be afraid, but I'm going to get you through this.
"Do you trust me, Grace?"
GraceGrace stretches out on the couch at last, lying down on her side. She shuts her eyes then, squeezing them tight against the rising red tide of the room. It smells coppery. She can almost taste it.
"I trust..." she starts, but cannot finish. There is blood in her mouth, and she must hold her breath, can't speak like this. Instead, her hands come up to her eyes, pressing tight against them, and her legs want to curl up again.
It's just a vision. Just a vision. The sensations are just that -- random neuron firings, nothing else. But the blood surges warm around her, tastes like metal in her mouth, and she has to force herself to breathe.
Then, it feels like the bubbling rasp of blood flowing into her lungs. She coughs.
Nothing will come for her, except for her own mind, Grace thinks. Her broken, malfunctioning mind. It will come for her at the end.
SerafíneGrace stretches out; Sera follows suit, sliding from the arm of the couch onto the cushions beside Grace, kicking out her legs and shimmy slithering down the couch alongside the Virtual Adept. Maybe the scent of smoke, of cloves and burnt sugar, of tobacco and whiskey, of Chanel No. 5, which is the scent Sera has chosen to pair with her usual mixture of skin and sweat and salt and alcohol and smoke, maybe these many and myriad scents are not enough to slide between the stutterstep moments of Grace's waking nightmare, but there they are.
Sera settles beside Grace; also on her side. One arm tucked beneath her narrow frame, the other reaching to wrap around Grace's arm and shoulder, holding her.
Holding her.
And Sera bends her head, rests her brow against the back of Grace's skull, nose against Grace's spine, close enough that each breath stirs the fine hairs on Grace's skin. There is nothing else to say, and so Sera says nothing. She breathes, and she breathes Grace in, the sour tinge of sweat and fear, the gut-wrenching seizure of it all, enduring, entire.
The humming begins beneath her breath; lingers in her throat, behind her mouth. If Grace is in any state of mind sufficient to pick out the melody, she might recognize it as a song that Sera has sung for her before.
SerafíneMind 2: empathic projection. Safe/sound. Difficulty: 5, -1 (resonance); -1 (focus).
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 3, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
GraceIt's difficult to feel safe in the midst of drowning in a lake of blood. But then, there is Sera, and Sera is Magic. Her song is relief itself, and even though Grace is drowning, she doesn't much care anymore.
There is Sera, floating in the red sea, holding on to her, smelling of smoke and cacophony and blood. Her lungs burn with the effort of breathing, all thick and bubbling and full. And yet, she can still smell. How odd.
The tightness with which she's held her body shifts into slack.
She doesn't mind the arms around her, the feeling of breath at her neck. For once, the other things going on in her waking nightmare are far too distracting for her to even register these things as something to flee from.
SerafíneThe song quiets; changes; deepens. The words are a wish; are a promise; are a prayer, and the words hardly matter.
Safe. Safe. Safe.
Safe and sound.
The song is a prayer to the moon and a promise to the body; it is an invocation of mercy and mercy, now, is all Sera can offer Grace in the midst of her hallucinations. Oh, Sera remembers dying; this is not something she has forgotten, some pain she has failed to remember, some loss she has subsumed into her skin, some disaster she has wiped clean. Some darkness she allows beneath her skin but only in shadow.
Sera does not hallucinate, and she does not have nightmares, and she does not remember her dreams, but she remembers what it felt like to drown in her own blood; to tear herself open and to be torn open, again and again and again. Locked in a sterile white room,
dying
alone, alone, alone.
Grace will not die alone. Not tonight. Tonight she's safe; tonight, she's safe and she's Safe and she's safe. She is whole and she is sound.
The song begins to ravel, pulls itself into its component parts; sloughs itself to pieces. Sera's brow against the base of Grace's skull, her breath warm, her right arm worming its way beneath her body. Sera, wrapping Grace up in her arms, finding her way out of her skin, into another's. Beneath another's.
The hallucinations do not disappear; Sera cannot banish them. But the pain. The sensation of it -
SerafíneMind 2: extending. Difficulty +1 (extending) -1 (taking time.)
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 2, 4) ( success x 1 )
SerafíneAnd: Mind 2 (empathic projection - safe and sound)/Life 3 (call it panacea. Sera is taking away/taking on the physical sensations of Grace's hallucinations on her own body.) Difficulty: 7. -1 (focus) -1 (time)
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3) ( success x 1 ) [WP]
SerafíneExtending. Difficulty +1 -1 (Quint)
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
SerafíneExtending. Ditto.
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (4, 8, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
GraceGrace opens her eyes, breathes. And for a change, she isn't breathing blood. She can see it, she knows it's there, knows what's coming, even, but no -- it won't touch her.
It's like she's floating around somewhere else, watching this happen to someone else. Like it's a movie of her life. Separate.
"Sera," she says, when she can speak again. "Whatever you're doing, it's working."
Working, indeed. But Grace doesn't know how -- doesn't know that what Sera takes, she puts upon herself.
Her skin begins to crack open, to spill its contents into the sea of blood, but Grace doesn't feel it. Can't know it's happening, unless she looks down at herself.
Serafíne"I know." Sera says; will, perhaps, even remember saying, though her lungs are full of fluid and her skin is tearing itself open and her body is wretched, debilitated, ruined.
She can't breathe. She nuzzles Grace.
She keeps Working, and pushes every sliver of herself into her Work.
"I know. Close your eyes Grace.
"Go to sleep."
SerafíneExtending.
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 10, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
SerafíneStamina: (this feels bad).
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )
GraceShe's floating on nothingness, sensation taken, safety assured. It's so easy to start to drift off again, once the adrenaline wears itself out. Sluggishness takes over when the chemicals of panic abate.
There's a hum, and arms around her, and breath at her neck, and blood everywhere, but none of it matters, none of it reaches awareness. It's like Grace has been numbed to everything that feels wrong.
Even as her body sublimes, piece by piece, the blood lake digesting her whole. There's nothing to feel. Nothing to fear.
There is only darkness behind closed lids.
Serafíne(Paradox.)
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5) ( fail )
Serafíne(Take that consensual reality.)
SerafíneAnd Sera. All night long she does nothing but drown.
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