Grace slides the door to the Chantry shut, and strides out into the backyard with her hands full. One hand holds a mug of hot chocolate, the other a fluffy red throw. She doesn't wrap it around herself, because Grace typically covers herself neck to foot in weather like this anyway, but Sera...
Sera's going to visit the Node, in the snow, wearing a cut-out dress, and whether or not she ends up in the hot spring, she might want to get warm or dry sometime.
Mind you, Grace doesn't think that last note very likely, but blankets are something akin to love in Kalen's eyes, so of course he bade her bring Sera one.
SerafíneSnow piles on the grass and the hedges and the patio, slides in sloppy wet piles from the furniture to the flagstone, glistens in the failing sunlight, or moonlight, or whatever light there is tonight; light from the uncurtained windows certainly, the absolute blaze of it visible through the glass. It melts around the hotspring, though. In a not precisely mathematical setting, and in the bright cold air the steam is that much more opaque.
Sera has abandoned her heels near the glass sliders leading onto the patio and her bare footprints wend through the snow.
Her back is to the door. The spare curve of her spine framed artfully by the low-backed dress, the suggestion of ink just visible on her left flank, another hint high on her right shoulder blade.
She is quiet; still; distant. Distracted enough that she is not likely to notice the doors opening, or Grace's approach.
Skimming one fishnet-clad toe through the steaming water.
Grace"Hey, Sera? Aren't you cold? Want a blanket?" Grace asks, following wet-snow footprints to the hot spring.
She folds up the throw, and leaves it by the edge of the spring. If she wants, Sera can use it. If not, oh well. Then, she sits on the wet rocks next to Sera. Right now, the Node feels to Grace like any other. There is no sense of magic about it, or anything for that matter, but she starts unlacing her shoes so she can join in on the toe-dipping anyway.
"Or just want some company?"
SerafíneSera shakes her golden head.
All those messy curls, now a bit damp from the steam, slithering over her shoulders, her spine.
She still seems so far away and she's standing up when Grace sits to start taking off her shoes, but oh, Sera - see, she sinks to a fairly effortless crouch. This natural athleticism evident in her frame - usually buried by the demands of the mad heels she wears but look at her now - easy, thoughtless, unaffected. Elbows braced on her knees, the garters pulled tight against her skin from the changed stance.
"A year ago today," Sera informs Grace, with this mild, wry, rather internal sort of smile, "I didn't know this place was here."
Grace"A year ago today, I wasn't Awake yet," Grace says, as she wrenches a shoe off and deposits it in the snow. "If I found out about this place, that would involve some explaining."
She then starts with the other shoe. Places that one in the snow as well. Then socks.
And oh, look -- feet.
Which promptly plunk into the water. It's too cold to go barefoot for long.
Grace[I must afk now! If you're even still here!]
SerafíneSometimes, sometimes, it seems as if the air that Sera breathes in is somehow wholly different from that air that lives in everyone else around here.
Some thread of Grace's movement catches Sera's attention, something peripheral and haloed, incomplete and suggested, and Sera glances up from the water then, the gleam of her steady gaze a dark and strangely twilit blue. Not the early light when the sun has just drowned itself against the horizon, but something darker, deeper. Gleaming.
And yet, her attention is spare, neatly framed. The supple curvature of her mouth quiet nearly delicate. Sera's smile curves all the sweeter the longer she studies Grace in that loving, absent manner, and there there is a distance implicit in both her manner and her glance that cannot be unwritten.
Distant.
Aching.
Lovely.
This note of mutable understand that feels as if it has been tattooed into her skin and etched into her bones. Oh, she breathes in. Breathes in, and breathes out, and allows herself to feel the exquisite ache of the past where it folds itself into the present. Where they are the same, under her skin.
Oh god, she hurts sometimes.
How she hurts sometimes.
How she breaks her own fucking heart.
--
Still: a certain stripped-down clarity as she inhales a deep breath of the steam billowing from the hot spring and allows the warmth to settle into her lungs.
And knows, without question, that whatever it is she needs tonight, she will not find it here.
"Thank you for the blanket, Grace."
Sera says this to Grace as she herself straightens. Says it and means it but still there is some interstitial thing, some place-between that lives within the words but does not wholly surface.
"I think I'm going to go. Be well," and here Sera bends down, the sweeping curtain of her hair all damp and golden and she presses a kiss to Grace's temple, with such careful tenderness for such a careless creature. "Good night."
--
Barefoot in the snow, Sera picks her way across the patio back to the doors.
She is here. She is everywhere.
One year ago.
Somehow when she slides open the glass doors and slips inside the chantry proper, the warmth inside makes her shiver far more than the cold without.
Grace"Hey, no," Grace says, and (as much as it stings) takes her feet out of the hot spring. "You came out here to see the Node, don't let me stop you. You need to be alone, I can leave. It's no big deal."
She grabs up her shoes and socks, along with the blanket, to bolt for the Chantry through the snow -- to beat Sera there, so the Cultist can go and do what she came to do.
SerafíneIf Grace catches up to Sera somewhere near the door, Sera holds the door open for Grace, gives the Virtual Adept a spare and winsome smile that is threaded lightly with a wordless apology and a much deeper and older kind of ache; and walks inside after her, scoops up her heels from just inside the doors and heads back toward the kitchen, where Dan waits for her.
He's watching her.
He's watching for her. Waiting.
He knows as soon as he sees her that they are going to go.
Grace"Sera, seriously," Grace says, hovers around just long enough to realize that Sera's not going to respond, just give her strange looks.
It's her. It's got to be her. She's the one making Sera all weird and uncomfortable and cutting her visit to the Node short, and all the hovering certainly can't be helping.
"Um. Right, okay. I'll just ah," she says, making motions to the hall where she can flee to give Sera some space.
And she flees.
In doing so, she reminds herself of what she just told Kalen a few minutes ago. Sera's a big girl. Whatever it is, it's sure to be okay. After all, they went through hell and they came back.
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