The day in Denver had been warm and clear. The seemingly random bad weather that springs off the mountains to the west staying away, turning it into one of those days that promises that summer is not too far behind. But the day has passed through evening and into night. The sun has set, the sky is clear, and the city is cooling down.
It is the clear sky that brings Alexander outside tonight. He’s found a blanket inside, large and thick enough to spread out in the pasture to the side of the House. This is where he can be found – lying on his back, staring up at the stars. Morrison is not so far away from the city for the light pollution to be completely absent, but far enough that more of the universe is visible to those who would want to watch it.
So here he is. Grey long-sleeved hoodie on over a white t-shirt, dark green combats, walking boots. There’s an open bottle of beer sat on the grass, with the rest of the four-pack still unopened in its packaging. A leather jacket lies folded next to it, and an open pack of tortilla chips lies forgotten nearby too.
It’s cold outside. But not Frozen.
Serafíne(Who is out there? Perception plus awareness)
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 4, 7, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 1
Alexander Brandt[Am I about to get company?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 7) ( success x 1 )
SerafíneTires on the driveway. That's his primary warning that he is about to get company. The wash of headlights over the dark sweep of rolling, open land that surrounds the chantry proper. Someone's coming or going but isn't someone always coming or going out here. A communal house that houses only one or two inhabitants or an ordinary day, but there is always someone dropping by,
and Sera felt the chill in the air from miles and miles away, or so it seems to Dan, who is driving her here, to whom she announced Alexander's presence way back at the turnoff from the mainroad. She was leaning into the passenger's window of the old white conversion van, her forehead pressed to the glass, her breath warm enough to fog up the glass a bit, feeling everything, feeling the road beneath the tires, feeling the sky full of light, feel the point of contact between magic and the earth, the fount of the node. Feeling frozen, feeling feeling feeling,
and so whilst Dan does whatever it is that he is going to do, whatever it is that Sera brought him here to do, Sera wanders through the house and grabs a bottle of something and lets herself out of the glass slides and steps out of her spike heels there and grabs them by straps with her first two fingers and - barefoot in a short - shredded - red cocktail dress picks her way through the pasture.
It is not late enough that the grass is damp, and the chill in the air is bright and strangely unexpected against her skin, so Sera's shivering a bit by the time she makes it to Alexander's side. Nudges him with the bottle she has in hand to say hello.
Hello! says that nudge,
and the Sera, "Hey. Whatchat lookin' at. Mind company?"
Alexander BrandtThat’s one of the things he likes about the house – its location means that it doesn’t really get a lot of noise. So when there’s the sound of something – an SUV, van, or something else of that size – pulls up, it’s certainly warning that somebody is arriving. Not that it necessarily means that company is arriving. Alexander’s been out here before when the resonance of someone has arrived or left, without any physical contact between them. He’d actually been hoping to catch the owner of that defensive anger some time, but chance hadn’t brought them to the house at the same time just yet.
It’s only when Sera steps out from the house and heads towards the pasture that he feels her. He doesn’t get up or look round as she walks over, already confident that it is who he thinks. So he’s still lying on the blanket when she stops, nudges him with the bottle. Hello! says the nudge. Hello! back says the hand patting an empty bit of blanket.
He turns to look at Sera when she speaks, and when he replies. “Not at all,” he says to the company. “Grab my jacket if you’re cold. I don’t seem to mind it so much these days.” He looks back up into the sky again. “Nothing. Everything. Just looking, really. Trying to remember the constellations.” A few moments go by and Alexander looks back at Sera. “How’re you doing? And how’s the ass?” He smiles as he asks that last part, trying to make a joke of their previous meeting in the market.
Serafíne"Brilliant." Sera breathes out, with a flash at Alexander's profile as she takes a seat on the blanket, feels the grass spongy beneath the blanket bend and even break a bit more as she sits. There is a bit of a shiver from her she's setting her teeth against the cold and of course she's wearing almost nothing, this slip of a dress that has been slashed through without much consideration for what is concealed and what is revealed about her body and, hey, without heels she is rather short but even barefoot she walks with a swagger as if she were seven feet tall. "My ass is always brilliant."
The truth is, Sera doesn't get the joke but she doesn't mind it either and perhaps she does not remember that piece of their encounter at the market the way he does. Her senses swim, oh, lovely, and she swims within them and she is cold she realizes then so she does take his jacket. Shakes it out and drapes it over her shoulders and brings her own bottle - larger than his, wine or whiskey, perhaps - between her legs.
Bare feet flat on the blanket, on the grassy field.
"I don't know the names of any fucking constellations. What ones do you remember?"
Head tipped back as she considers the stars.
Alexander BrandtAlexander watches Sera as she sits, looking at her striking profile. Not from lust or any thoughts of romance. More to get a better look at the woman who always seems so sure of herself, who he doesn’t actually know all that much about. He pushes himself up a little, resting on his elbows, then holds out the beer bottle. “Cheers.” He takes a swig and then puts the bottle back on the grass.
“A few. That one up there, the three stars close together in a line?“ Alexander points up at the sky. “That’s Orion’s Belt. There are others that make up the rest of him and his bow, but I can’t remember which.” He moves his arm, pointing elsewhere in the sky. “That’s the Big Dipper, the group of seven. Looks like a cooking pot with a bent handle. And that bright one up there,” he points elsewhere again,” is the North Star. Favoured by sailors and people who have broken their compass.”
He lies back on the blanket again. “I was told once that it’s almost like looking back in time. We’re seeing those stars as they were hundreds of years ago. They might not even be there anymore.”
SerafíneSera takes a long-swig of whatever-it-is she brought out with her and leans back to look up as Alexander points out the most recognizable pieces of the constellations he remembers. Orion's belt receives a hmmm from her, recognition stitched into the timbre of her voice. Of the name or the stars or the line they define so sharply in the night sky. Once she sees the belt she recognizes the rest of Orion - who is so recognizeable - and it takes her a moment or two to pull herself away and then re-orient on the Big Dipper, and the North Star.
Favored by sailors Alexander informs her and that makes Sera remember another conversation she had once not far from here: a different night, a different season, the world still as it always is, framed by light. Now and then and never and will be all wrapped together at once.
"Time's just another fiction," Sera tells him, giving him a slanting glance as he remarks on how old the light of the stars actually is. "Everything is. Everything's just - "
And she breathes in, takes another swig, then flops back on the blanket as well, one arm crooked beneath the back of her head, the other on her bottle.
"You're figuring out how it works, right?" she asks him then, still looking at the stars. "For you? It's different for everyone."
Magic, she means. Of course she does.
Alexander BrandtSera might feel the move of the blanket as Alexander shrugs. A few moments pass as he thinks. Or, perhaps, doesn’t think but waits for inspiration. Those moments pass. “Yes. No. Both.” He looks back at Orion’s Belt, trying to make out the rest of the figure. “In general, yes. Right now, I don’t know. Maybe. I just used to do this as a kid. The looking at the stars? I always loved being outdoors. Still do.”
It’s not really much of an answer to her question, but it’s all he really has at the moment. It’s not like he’s been here for hours meditating on life’s great mysteries. Not that that’s how he’d have thought about it even if he had. He’s just been... here. Not really thinking about much of anything, which is as close to meditating as he gets.
He goes quiet again for a little while before asking, “How long have you been Awake for? Did you know what was going on when it happened?”
SerafíneYes. No. I don't know. Maybe.
Somehow altogether these add up to just the right answer and the shadow of it makes Sera grin, quietly in the darkness. She hums, too, beneath her breath or beneath her skin and cannot really drink from that bottle while she's laying back and looking at the stars so she tips her chin up for a quick swig, but mostly ignores the damned thing.
Quiet's okay. Quiet's fine.
Alexander's quiet and not really thinking about anything and really does Sera ever just think about anything? She must be just feeling: the brilliance of the sky, the cushion of the crushed grass beneath them. The chill in the air and the fading memory of warmth in the ground. The points of departure: where night becomes day and spring becomes summer, these places between all around them.
He asks what he asks her and she does think about it then. Holds that too against her tongue, in her throat, the idea-of-it, the knowledge beneath, and considers what she will say and how she will say it. Whether she will say it at all. But -
"I don't really remember waking up." Sera tells Alex, or perhaps confesses. Listen, she is quiet. This is an old fear and an old wound. "I'm pretty sure it was gradual, though, not all-at-once like it was for you. Wrapped up with a whole bunch of other shit, so I'm not sure I knew it was happening."
A beat.
"I'm twenty-four now, so. Six years? Seven, maybe."
Alexander BrandtI don’t know. He’s no stranger to not knowing, but Alexander seems to be saying that an awful lot more these days. And not just about this new, brighter view of life that he’s woken up to. How are you? What happened? What are you going to do? The answers are slowly coming, but the questions seem to come so much faster. Sera feels. Alexander does. Not always the smartest thing, but usually something.
What he does now is listen. He’s good at that. Partly because it’s a good way to find stuff out from, and about, people. But the bigger part because he generally cares about people too. Alexander turns his head to look at Sera again while she speaks, quieter than usual. Asks, “did you have someone helping you figure it all out?”
A beat of his own. “You seem so much older sometimes. I don’t mean you look old or anything. Just... your mind or your spirit, I guess. It seems older than your body.” He looks up at the stars again, wondering if that actually made much sense.
Serafíne"We're all older than our bodies."
Oh how she's fooled him, Sera. He hasn't seen her breaking down, broken down. He hasn't seen her crying, or shaking, or on her knees in his bathroom at 4 a.m. puking her guts out. He hasn't seen her as anything but someone who knows what the fuck is going on, which is also Sera, and also true.
"Our avatars. Our souls. Whatever the fuck it is that helps us connect with the universe and open our fucking eyes. We've been here before. We'll come back again, maybe.
"Different, but - "
Oh, she feels in that moment connected to everything. Neat little stitches drawn with a neat little hand through the stuff of her skin. Finely wrought, beautifully made. Her shoulderblades against the blanket over the grass, her hair arrayed around her head like a halo. Knees bent, bare feet flat, heels empty beside her left hip.
"I had someone. Yeah. I don't really remember her either. I know her name, though.
"Claire."
--
"You are gonna figure this all out, you know."
Ian Lai[Awareness?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 5, 5, 9) ( success x 1 )
Ian LaiIt was a quiet night at the chantry. Alexander and Serafine were out in the pasture, looking at the stars, and perhaps the presence of a third party might not be a welcome interruption (particularly given the nature of Alexander and Ian's previous encounter.) But as they spoke, the headlights of Ian's Audi cast a white glow over the ground as he pulled into the driveway behind Sera's Jeep. His engine idled for a moment before going quiet.
When Ian left the car, he stopped to look out over the darkened landscape, and a subtle wisp of combined resonance drew his eyes toward to pasture, and the two shadowed figured seated there. Ian watched them for a moment, giving his keys a little spin around his finger before pocketing them. Then he began to make his way across the lawn, ducking between the wooden slats in the open fence as he crossed into the pasture.
"No boots tonight?" he asked of Sera, offering a light smile if she happened to look in his direction.
Alexander BrandtShe was the one to find Alexander when he was convinced he was mad, ready to fling himself into oblivion. She was so sure when they were pulled into the Umbra by a sending. So he is... fooled? Does that imply deception? Mistaken then? Or maybe she is only as human as everyone else, and Alexander is yet to see her on a bad day. When that day comes? Well, she was there for him. So where else is he going to be?
“I didn’t know that. That the Avatars crossed lifetimes, I mean. How does that work, then? What happens to it when somebody dies?” Or to the spirit, for that matter. Now that he knows there is a spirit, that there is some kind of afterlife... What happens after?
Another look Sera’s direction as he says, “Claire. Could you find her? If you wanted to, I mean.” He knows there’s history he doesn’t know – and maybe she doesn’t know either – so would that even be something she wants to do?
The sound of the car goes relatively un-noticed. But the approaching resonance, familiar from the park not so long ago? Alexander rolls his eyes and sighs, not in the mood for games. He sits back up to rest on his elbows and looks towards the new arrival.
SerafíneSera shrugs quietly, still sprawled back, her hand splayed open beneath her skull, and there is a kind of surrender in the shrug, though she is as assured in her not-knowing as she is in her knowing.
"Fuck if I know - " and he can hear the half-smile soldered into the words, which in turn threads itself into this supple crescent of a grin as she turns her head and casts a lashed glance at his profile. Dark against the darkness, but distinct, see? A different sort of breathing shadow.
She means, it too. To all of that. Fuck if she knows how Avatars work, fuck if she knows what happens when we die, fuck if she knows what comes next or what came before or where we go when we dream, just that those things happen and each of us is our own sort of universe, this endlessly recursive series of worlds, and she is who and what she is, and she loves that,
loves that,
loves that.
"Might be some books in the library if you want to research it, though. Or you could ask one of the Hermetics. They usually like to read."
This brief, supple grin engages her quick mouth, hidden in the darkness.
"Some of them like to talk, too. And Claire?"
A shake of her head.
"Naw. I'm pretty sure she's dead."
--
Sera's senses are blown wide open tonight. She could feel Ian a half-mile away. A mile. Miles and miles, maybe, peripheral, like a satellite slowly spiraling back to earth at the edges of her awareness, then closer and closer to the center, and then he's here and he comments on her lack-of-boots and she lifts one long, bare leg to show him no, no, no boots tonight.
"Barefoot."
Barelegged too though her heels are on the blanket beside her and she is wearing a remarkably tiny red dress that covers just enough to avoid an indecency charge.
"Do you guys know each other?"
Ian LaiNeither the sigh nor the roll of Alexander's eyes went unnoticed by Ian, but he didn't offer any particular reaction. Instead he regarded the pair thoughtfully, as though he wasn't entirely sure yet whether he intended to stay or to merely offer a quick greeting. When Sera lifted her leg to show off her bare feet, Ian let his eyes trail from the tip of her pointed toes to the hem of her dress, admiring the way the moon and starlight highlighted the shape of her leg.
"It's a good look on you."
Did he and Alexander know each other? Ian crouched down in the grass, leaving the blanket for its two original occupants, and perched there on the balls of his feet, dipping a hand down to splay his fingers in the grass. The ground beneath it was cold to the touch.
"Not really. We ran into each other once."
He didn't elaborate any further.
Alexander BrandtAlexander was about to say that he’d ask the Hermetics that he knew, even though what little he knew of the Dreamspeakers and Euthanatos made them more likely to be able to answer his questions. But Ian is there, and the conversation changes onto a different track.
Alexander looks at the other man for a few moments. “Yeah, we’ve met.” His tone isn’t particularly warm. But he seems to make a choice and shuffles round on the blanket a little, bending his legs to make some space for the newcomer – if he wants it. “There’s beer if you want some,” he says, nodding towards the three remaining bottles. Alexadner isn’t going anywhere, at least not yet. And that meeting certainly wasn’t the worst first encounter with Mage-kind. He’s open to seeing what happens.
SerafíneSee? Alexander already knows more about how to figure shit out than Sera does or perhaps ever will. Hermetics have books and read them like whoa; therefore, ask them any factual question you might have and proceed to more or less ignore their answers because who the fuck cares is perhaps her philosophy of research.
And Ian's admiring the shape of her leg in the starlight and Sera's enjoying stretching the muscles, the balance of leverage, the pointed curl of her toes, and Alexander makes room on the blanket but Sera herself does not really think of that. She just makes a noise in the back of her throat and drops her leg after a time and plants both feet on the ground, flat, knees bent, the cocktail stress just covering her hips, still holding her bottle with one hand and cradling her blond head with the other.
"Every looks a good look on me," Sera informs Ian with a quick flash of her teeth in the darkness. "Even better off." The last delivered with a laugh that becomes open mouthed.
"We were just talking about the stars," Sera informs Ian. "How many constellations can you pick out?"
Ian LaiAlexander shifted on the blanket, and Ian glanced at him for a long, silent moment. It wasn't entirely clear what he was thinking (Ian could be difficult to read even in the daylight,) but eventually he seemed to decide to stick around for a while, because he stood up and walked over to the open patch of blanket. After lowering himself onto it, he stretched his legs out into the grass, crossing them at the ankle, and lay back with his head on Sera's legs. If she seemed to mind his presence there, he'd move. Otherwise, he'd raise an arm and fold it underneath his head, letting his fingers graze the skin on Sera's calf.
Ian had on a white t-shirt underneath a light leather jacket. When he stretched out, the hem of the t-shirt rode up a little on his stomach, but he didn't seem to mind when the chilled breeze touched his skin.
"Maybe later," he answered when Alex offered him a beer.
Sera asked him how many constellations he could pick out.
"I don't really know astronomy. The dippers, I guess." (Everyone knew those.) "Someone showed me Scorpio once, but I don't think I remember it."
Alexander BrandtIgnore what they say or, depending on the Hermetic, have trouble taking it all in and remembering it later. Some woman having visions on a mountain got together with a few other mages to create what would turn into the Traditions? Wasn’t that the basic gist of how the cool kids got together for survival?
Alexander shuffles again, booted feet flat on the ground with his knees up. He takes a last swig from the beer bottle, draining it dry, before lying back on the blanket again. “We could make our own up. Like looking for the shapes in clouds, just with the stars instead. There’s...” he turns his head round, squints a little, points to a random patch of sky. He smiles when he finishes the sentence, “Hera’s handbag.” The smile fades a little as he lifts his head to look towards the other man. “I’m Alexander, by the way.”
SerafíneHere is a noise for Alexander, all back of the throat and bemused, the sort that lingers there and thrums beneath her skin and reminds her of the way hearts and mouths work, and god knows what-all-else. But listen: Alexander names Hera's purse and Sera breathes out through her nostrils this silent sort-of-laugh and Ian's stretched out now with his head resting on her legs and Sera is surprised by this but she is also: look and languid and she requires contact the way most people require oxygen and therefore, she does not shake him off. Just lifts her chin a bit to glance down the line of her body at him, starlight flashing across the surface of her dark eyes.
That look lasts just for a moment then her head is tipped back again.
"That one looks like a ballerina balancing on a rhino's horn," Sera proposes to Alexander, pointing at something in the sky that could be a star or maybe a satellite and certainly bears no resemblance to a ballerina balancing on a rhino's horn so either she's hallucinating or she's making a joke.
Then Alexander is introducing himself and Sera finds herself saying, to Ian,
"Alexander's awesome." Which is: true, although she doesn't know why she's saying it.
Ian LaiIan actually laughed a little at Alexander's suggestion, giving a light exhale. "Ian."
There. Now they'd met (officially.) And they'd actually managed to exchange a few words without lacing them with barbs or hidden meaning. Whatever was the world coming to? Perhaps it was Sera's presence that changed the dynamic, or maybe Alex was just a decent guy willing to give a relative stranger a second chance.
Sera imagined that she saw a ballerina, and perhaps she meant something by it (Ian didn't know how much of their encounter in the park she actually remembered,) or perhaps she said it without really making the connection. Either way, Ian didn't seem to care. He lifted his free arm and pointed at a spot in the sky.
"That's clearly a bunch of centaurs having an orgy."
Sera thought that Alexander was awesome. And Ian? Just smiled, all wry and one-sided, and abstained from comment.
Alexander BrandtAlexander nods to Ian in greeting as they exchange names and relaxes a little. Perhaps Alexander is a decent guy, and maybe he reacts better when he doesn’t feel like he’s being played with by a complete stranger. Either way, he’s comfortable and had no urge to run off and leave the others behind. Again.
The suggestions from the others get him laughing, strangely without feeling like he has to hold anything back. There’s no imminent disaster, no bruised feelings, no floundering out of his depth or awkwardness at being the clueless new guy who barely knows enough to keep himself out of trouble. Who cares about baggage from the past, or the great unknowns of the future? For now, at least. Come the next disaster, mystery, other weirdness, or maybe even the next morning? They may well come back. But for now he’s feeling the happiest he has in a while.
The smile comes across in Alexander’s tone as he speaks. “That is not centaurs having an orgy. That is definitely a group of nuns riding a carousel.” He reaches for the tortilla chips and nudges the other two Mages with the bag, offering them.
SerafíneSera makes a noise when Ian suggests centaurs having an orgy. Bless Sister Mary Peter, who was her Antiquities instructor before Sera was kicked out of boarding school for being, essentially, a Sera, because Sera does know myths. Or myth. Some myths anyway: those hoary old Greeks, all the betrayal and infighting, all the incest and secrecy.
"Don't you mean satyrs?" she asks Ian when he proposes centaurs, nudging him a bit with her knee or her thigh, lifting her head to take a swig from whatever the fuck is in that bottle, then dropping it back again.
"Anyway, why don't we split the difference and call it a group of nuns having an orgy on a carousel?"
Ian LaiAlexander was happier than he'd been in a long time, but Ian didn't have any frame of reference to understand what the moment meant to him. Neither was he fully aware of the degree to which Alexander had interpreted their last encounter as manipulative. Ian himself likely wouldn't have described it that way, but since his intentions remained difficult to parse, the only interpretation Alex had to work with was his own. It was a fair guess that the two of them might never be the best of friends, but for the moment at least, that night seemed a distant thing.
Sera found a way to combine the two constellations, and Ian grinned, his teeth gleaming like ivory in the darkness. "I like the way you play this game."
And he tilted his head to look up at her, offering some sort of silent exchange. (Like he was asking for permission to do... something.) Beneath his head, he let his fingers brush slow strokes along her skin.
Evidently the fact that Alex was sitting right beside them was not much of a deterrent from flirting.
SerafínePer + Awareness as empathy: look?
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 7, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )
Alexander Brandt“Yeah, that works,” Alexander adds, still smiling. His presence may not be any deterrent against flirting but, then, it’s been subtle enough so far that it hasn’t made him feel awkwardly in the way and find a reason to leave. “Might need a less obvious name, though. Sister Mary’s Pleasure, or something like that?” Because aren’t all good nuns called Mary?
While he has no urge to run away, a certain urge to run to something has been building for a little while. Between the beer and the cold, it’s starting to become rather insistent. “I’ll be right back,” he says to the others as he rolls round onto his knees and stands. “Call of nature. And not the clawed furry kind. You guys want anything from inside?” He waits for the answers from the two still on the blanket before heading in to find the bathroom.
[And OOCly, it’s nealy 6am and I’m flagging – thank you for the scene!]
Ian LaiPerhaps in his attempt to communicate, Ian reveals more than he'd intended. He is tired. Not physically, but emotionally. Tired and worn around the edges, and something in the wanting of his gaze suggests a deep desire in him to just... let these things go. To forget. To be something else for a while. Something he knows. Something he is good at.
He thinks Sera is beautiful. He hasn't exactly hidden that fact. For all that she is a very different sort of creature than him. For all that he's seen her in some of her less flattering moments. She has something primal and honest that he wants to surround himself with. Something bright and vibrant enough to chase everything else away.
See, he doesn't care that Alex is there. He might very well start hitting on Alex, too, were it not for the fact that Alex was leaving.
In the most basic terms: He wants a distraction. He wants to get laid. But right now he's just asking if he can touch her. Kiss her maybe. More than what he's doing now.
SerafíneSera breathes out sharply as Alexander takes his leave. Maybe there was a laugh beneath her breath for the joke-within-a-joke. Maybe there was something else in the way she watches him, as he pushes himself to his feet and rises to head (briefly) inside. Leaves the blanket and the other mages behind though. The four remaining beers from the six pack and Sera with her wine-or-whiskey and the night sky and the renamed constellations and the cool night air, and Sera -
- rises to her elbows and shakes out her (dyed) blond curls and looks down the line of her body at Ian. Her gaze is both slanted and shadowed but she is such an open creature, there is no deception in her. Nothing close to it, although sometimes the wick and the moonlight conspire to create something like it, some illusion of a veil.
That is how she remains for a rather long moment: quiet, see, her mouth not precisely pursed, watching Ian as he touches her, as he strokes her skin in a way that is really rather intimate for all that they are virtual strangers. This slidingly astute look, this quiet hum of awareness that skims and - here and there - dives below the superficial mystery of a stranger.
"I didn't know we were playing a game. I sure as hell don't know the fucking rules. If I did, I'd probably break them."
She picks up her bottle: another swig, the whiskey (see: it is whiskey, not wine) burns and brings tears to her eyes. Sera doesn't mind. Alexander is retreating toward the house, they can still hear his footsteps on the grass.
It is the exhaustion that touches her, above all else. Her voice is quiet when she tells him, softly, "You can kiss me if you want."
Ian Lai[Empathy, because permission and reciprocation are two very different things]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 3 )
SerafíneThere is always Want in Sera. Sera is a creature of Want and now is no different. Touch her the way he is touching her leg, the soft slow strokes, and she is so exquisitely responsive to that touch. The overriding beat in her right now, though, is empathy, a kind of shunted ache for Ian mixed with sort of sublingual surprise that he is not all slick surface. She would like to kiss him; she wants to inhale that emotional exhaustion straight from his body, see? but there is also an ambivalence about her that is a bit hard to parse because he knows so little about her, and in many ways, she knows so little about her self.
And around or beneath that ambivalence, he can sense that even if they do make out, he is probably not going to get laid tonight. At least not out here, on the blanket in the shadow of the chantry beneath the stars.
Ian Lai"No thanks," Ian replied lightly to Alex's request, glancing over at him as he stood up to leave. He probably wouldn't be gone long, but as he walked away the air grew still, and it became easy to forget that there were yet other people nearby.
(No, not easy to forget. They were there. You could feel them. But it seemed less important, somehow. To Ian, at least. Or maybe he'd never really cared to begin with.)
He'd meant the constellations, when he'd used the word 'game.' Now though? See that look in his eyes? Even in the dark, it was clear. More honest and direct than he almost ever was.
This was not a game to him.
And in the depths of it somewhere, perhaps Sera would see the flickers of something a little dark and feral that lived under the sleek surface of his skin. It was the same thing that had made him recoil from Kalen's attempts to provide comfort. The same thing that had led him down all manner of self-destructive paths in his younger days. See, not every part of him was clean. Not by a long shot.
In that moment, they didn't want the same thing. But they could have something, at least. So Ian turned his head and pressed his mouth to the place where his hand had been, closing his eyes as he kissed her leg. Then he unfolded his arm and sat up. But there was no rush. His energy was still and quiet.
"I'm not what you think I am."
He was, and he wasn't. It was a complicated answer.
"When I came out here, I was going to ask if you could let me into the library."
Maybe it was the stars. They did funny things to people.
He leaned forward and pressed another kiss to her temple, pausing there to let a gust of warm breath wash over her skin.
But he did not kiss her mouth.
"Maybe we should do that."
And he retreated then, pushing himself to his feet and holding a hand out to help her up, if she needed it.
SerafíneSera watches Ian quietly as he turns to press his mouth to her bare calf, or perhaps her thigh. Her skin is cool and the night is cold and faint little pinprick goosebumps scatter where his warm mouth touches her skin. She does not move, though, and there is a sort of grandeur in her stillness, the settled surety one expects from a priestess or a goddess. Then he rises, shift his weight, turns his body to lean up and press another kiss to her temple and here Sera closes her eyes. Her breath catches, and she cuts a brief glance all shunting-away, then back, lifting her chin to follow the track of his moon-and-starshadows across her lean frame.
He tells her, then, that he isn't what she thinks he is.
She makes a noise in the back of her throat, which sounds like assent, or at least like that's fair.
"I wonder what you think I am."
Sera murmurs as she reaches out to take his hand, allowing herself to be pulled upright.
"But sure. Alright, c'mon. Follow me, I'll let you in."
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