It is evening, it is evening falling into night and there is a sort of living warmth that still lingers in the air, the grass retains some last slivers of that strange sun-scent even though the sun itself has sunk more-or-less into shadow to the west. So here is light, twilight, which is painted in a half-dozen hues of heather and mist, which gathers in pools of shadow and spreads itself wide over a slowly waking world.
The chantry is surrounded by field and farrow and hill and dale. One could keep horses here, with enough of the right sort of work and an eye for the land. There is a gentle slope leading down from the chantry proper to one of those fields, the sort framed by split-rail fencing carefully repaired last season by someone-who-is-not-Sera, and it is on this gentle slope that Sera spread a fringed cotton-quilt likely appropriated from one of the bedrooms in the house proper, trampling down the long, still-mostly-dormant stalks of some prairie grass or other, toeing off her boots so that her feet were bare, then - well - shimmying out of nearly everything else so that she could sunbathe topless and not worry much about whether the pattern of her fishnets might be somehow tanned into her skin.
The sun's gone down, though. It's gotten colder. So, Sera has put most of her clothes back on - her stockings and her denim cut-offs, her bustier and her flannel shirt - and she is lying sprawled in the grass with her feet planted flat, her knees bent, her blonde hair spread around her face like a halo, one hand wrapped loose around the neck of a bottle of mead, the other flat on her bare, golden stomach, a rather twee picnic basket - yes picnic basket - on the grass beside her blanket. Closed, for now.
She's watching the sky change.
Breathing.
Just breathing.
Gallowglass[Awareness.]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 6, 6, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )
Gallowglass[Stamina]
Dice: 2 d10 TN8 (3, 5) ( fail )
GallowglassBreathing, then - just breathing is Dominic Adam Julian Gallowglass bani Bonisagus in the library of Bear House with his head pillowed in the crook of his elbow and his mouth slack and drool at the corner and his eyes gummed shut and he doesn't snore and he does look peaceful except for a crease along his forehead because he is asleep and his sleep is not nightmare-troubled but it isn't comfortable because he fell asleep at one of the library's desks. Breathing, then - just breathing is Dominic Adam Julian Gallowglass bani Bonisagus deep in the word-wood when a dull pang causes him to open his eyes and smack his tongue against his teeth and sit up, eyelids pink-rimmed, dream-choked, hair sticking up on one side and flattened on the other, and he looks around. Opens his eyes wide but his lids want to stay sloped, putting both hands on the desk's edge and pushing back.
He is Aware of somebody else near-by, not far-off, somebody who is enthralling, limimal, he can taste that liminality right now because he is still half-asleep, eyes drifting closed. He looks down at his journal, his pen and his papers, at the book he was using as a reference for notes and he closes the latter.
Clearly he needs a break if he's falling into a sleep that doesn't give him any genius insights.
Breathing, just breathing - he's just breathing when he leaves the house and comes strolling out across field and farrow and hill and dale at least across grass. The skin of his arms is goose-pimpling, cold. He looks sleepy still and just being Aware of a presence doesn't mean that one will find that Presence until one uses the Sphere of Correspondence but he has a hunch and he's following that hunch.
Sometimes his hunches are good as gold, no alchemy required. (But there's an alchemy to the mind, isn't there? Mind meeting fire, meeting - ) When he sees the little picnic, he says,
"Hey."
SerafíneWho is that talking to me!
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 2, 4, 4, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )
SerafíneSo, see.
It takes her a minute. She wasn't expecting him. But then:
"Hey."
Her hair smells like marijuana and oh look, there's a blue glass ashtray shaped like a leaf on the quilt beside her and the remnants of two or three cigarettes with blue paper and a scent like burnt cinnamon-clove-sugar-tobacco in the air; and also, the mustier, earthier, skunkier scent of tobacco and Sera does not stand up over even sit, she just tips the crown of her head backwards scrunching up: her golden hair and the patterned and now-grass-stained blanket and it makes her feel like an inchworm which she rather likes.
inch inch inchworm
And Sera smiles, this lazy and ridiculous and lovely smile, which is whole in the way that planets are whole, that galaxies are whole, that fucking universes are whole: everything seems contained within it.
"Have a seat." Lifting the mead-bottle in his... rather vague direction. "You want a drink?"
GallowglassHis cheek is still creased by the attentions of his sleeve, the edge of his journal, the edge of a page from his journal; his beard is close-trimmed tonight, just a little more than a neat on his jaw and around his mouth (as if he were a musketeer). He rubs his eyes with the palm of his left hand, planting his feet into the still-fallow just-greening wisps of prairie grass, his weight hard on the heels of his old converse high-tops (navy blue), and her laziness reminds his body that it would like to be lazy, that it is exhausted, and he yawns to keep it from bothering him about that exhaustion any more.
Have a seat. He's thinking about it. He starts with a crouch, which makes him wince. Adam is not a lithe jungle cat ready for action nor is he an action hero, used to springing out've cars and scaling the sides of buildings. He's a punk ass book jockey, and they do not stretch enough.
"What is it?" he says, with a dip of his head toward the mead-bottle - tilting his brow like he'd have a rack of antlers and was using those with which to indicate. Then, curiously, "Have we ever spoken when you were not on drugs?"
SerafíneWhat is it? Adam asks and,
"Redstone mead," Sera supplies, turning both her eyes and her golden head to watch him as the enormous tower of his body (from the prospective of a singularly prone position and rather Altered mind) compresses itself down into a crouch. Her eyes are half-closed but her smile lingers and it is nothing like a shadow; and there is in it no shadow of the shadows that have touched her days.
She runs a thoughtful finger down the foil broken to access the cork. Her nails are painted a deep and irridescent red-to-black color that may look like blood and may look like candied applies in the correct light, but probably seems merely dark in this fae twilight.
"And I don't fucking know," her head doesn't leave the ground. This is now deliberate; she likes the way it feels and the way the quilt bunches beneath her skull and the way "Maybe. Why do you ask?"
A moment later, tongue against the roof of her mouth, Sera, whose body feels like a warm and lazy species of sponge soaking in the whole goddamned world, looks back at Adam and inhales, as if breathing were some new and recently discovered form of sexual congress. "I like drugs. You know that Baudelaire poem, right?"
Gallowglass[Does he? Int + Academics, I guess.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )
GallowglassThe first time Adam had mead he thought that he would like it. He didn't like it. He didn't like how sweet it was how cloying on his tongue. He considers the bottle now and Serafíne's offer and Serafíne and she is gorgeous, isn't she. So many gorgeous women in Denver. The tension of a frown or trouble on his brow and he demures with this line of bullshit - " - mead is something I've sworn to only drink with one of the sídhe but thanks for the offer."
He does sit hard on his tailbone. Half-rolling to the side, because for all his basic self-assurance he is graceless. He straightens himself, grass-slicked soles re-planted on the ground. He's on the border of the blanket she culled from one of the bedrooms. He doesn't really care about sitting in the dirt.
His hands come together again, elbows resting on his knees, one forearm clasped by his other's hand.
"I know that Baudelaire poem. The martyred slaves of time one? Do you feel like a martyred slave of time?" He's curious, and his curiousity's a relentless thing. He even says it now: "I just wondered if your thoughts," a pause. "Why do you like drugs?"
He doesn't sound as judgmental as he could; just a touch fascinated, a touch careful, constrained.
Gallowglass[Hypothetical Roll. App (Specialty) + Emp. Diff 8. + WP because I hatechoo.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN8 (1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
SerafíneDoes Sera feel like a martyred slave of time?
"Fuck no."
Now Sera turns her head in Adam's general direction but she's no longer looking at him because he is too close to really be seen from this perspective, so perhaps she is looking at his grass-slicked Converse soul, and she knows the stars on the underside, that familiar pattern, and finds them charmingly surprising, she would've thought that punk-ass book jockeys would be in wingtips - worn, well-worn, shabby old wingtips - but wingtips nonetheless, and that knights would wear something clanky and spurred.
"It's the rest of it I like. That goddamned admonition to love something and inhale it so thoroughly you're intoxicated by it. Let yourself be transported, right? Give yourself over to something that just - inhales you, and makes you inhale like every fucking breath you're taking is a brand new revelation."
A small shrug here. A quiet, humming grin. The flannel shirt open and framing the slice of her body, the cropped leather bustier covered with silver studs. The slightly concave curve of her abdomen, her spare torso boasts a subtle sort of musculature that is defined more by the absence of fat than by the presence of strength. There are hints of ink beneath her right breast and scrawled down her left flank; other bits more visible on her hands and wrists and palms.
"And I like drugs because I'm the grass and I'm the sky and I'm the ground beneath my head and I'm that airplane all the fucking way up there going somewhere and never coming back; and all the people inside it drowsing or dreaming or fucking or complaining about that crying baby in seat 9-a or doing some goddamned boring shit when they should be getting goddamned drunk, someway or somehow, on something that makes their heart burst and their blood quicken and their body want. All those people and everyone else I'll never see, now or in the future, Amen.
"That is why I like them in general. Why the fuck do you like books?"
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