Hawksley left them behind. And there was something natural about that, at least in the way he did it. He did it without pain, without longing, without protracted anything at all. And it can't be easy, for anyone, to see the way he can turn around and make you feel like he's forgotten about you entirely. It isn't easy, for Collins, who was a trusted member of the Livingston household when Hawksley came red and protesting into the world. But you wouldn't know it, to look at him as Hawksley goes off on his own: he's stoic as ever, still as a monument. He is a stone sculpture of loyalty, and if there's warmth there, it is quite businesslike warmth.
He comes back, though. Some way or other, somewhere or other, he finds Sera and Collins again. And he was tan before, golden, but he's so dark now that it's surreal: he is bronze. His hair is bleached past wheat and past gold into near-white. His eyes are crystalline by the contrast. He is shirtless and shoeless and dirty and scratched and there is even sunburn on his shoulders and back and arms and chest but his eyes are wide and wild and he starts laughing when he sees them,
then collapses. His eyes roll back and everything.
--
Whether they take him to a doctor or not -- and Collins recommends it, and Collins has at least been briefed sparsely enough to mention offhand to Serafine that should she like, he will drop her back at the hotel before taking Mr. Rothschild to the emergency department, or that she can stay in the car, or what-have-you, and even leave it running so she has the A/C and the radio.
One way or another, it turns out that he has a touch of heat exhaustion. He is very, very dehydrated. The story is that he got drunk, ran off from his party, and got lost. Collins tells this story well; Collins is a very good liar. Hawksley is conscious and disoriented, laughing, babbling in Latin here and there. He is telling himself jokes. No one here speaks Latin so they have no idea how witty he's actually being, which he might be disappointed by later if he can remember it.
--
Some time passes. Overnight, maybe. He has an IV for a while, to rehydrate him. They make sure there's nothing more serious going on: some mild bloodwork, and so on. Maybe Sera visits him, and he is sitting up in a hospital bed with a milkshake and he's VERY PROUD OF HIS MILKSHAKE, it's strawberry, and he's in a delightful mood but keeps slipping into other languages, keeps dazing off into space and there's nothing physically wrong with him. And maybe Sera can't visit him, and Collins just tells her these things. If she asks.
Collins does not talk to her about the hospital, unless she asks.
--
Not very long later, certainly not several days, Hawksley ends up back at the hotel. And he is still very bronze of skin and pale of hair but his sunburns have already faded; he has that sort of skin, like it was made for the sun and won't long be bruised by it. He takes a very long shower, though he's not filthy; he got clean at the hospital, after all. He shaves, such as he does, which means his neck and a trim of his face. And when we say 'he shaves' we mean 'Collins gives him a shave and trim'. Of course.
Then he sends Collins off to order food, fruit and champagne and chocolate and steak and all the decadent sorts of things that Hawksley only sometimes eats, and he walks around the room in boxer-briefs that are close-cut and dark blue, humming. His legs are actually the same color as his torso. Maybe he took his pants off while
"-- flying," he sings, badly. "Flyyyying, flyyyyying," alternating high and low, grabbing Sera by the hand and waist and waltzing with her, knocking into a coffee table. It's been a day or two and he's supposedly lucid, but it barely seems so.
Serafíne(And does Sera visit? WP.)
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 3, 4, 4, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )
SerafíneIt was not easy for Sera to watch him leave and it was not easy for her to see him come back like that: sunburned, disoriented, mad somehow, right? Not his usual selfish exuberance either, but the different sort of madness, the one that is all about all those cell walls defining ourselves, our consciousness being lysed into a sort pf primordial every/no/thingness, solvent and somehow insoluble and after that she didn't go out and was grumpy and moody enough herself that Sera - who feels everything, everything - only noticed Collins' stoicism, which made her fucking moodier. So she glomped around the hotel drinking poire william until everyone in the world was asleep, and then she wandered the pre-dawn streets past Chanel and Cartier, past the American embassy, until she stumbled on a temple to the gods in the middle of the city and couldn't get in.
--
Right, see. He collapses. Collins is stoic and practical and assured and a pillar of everything in the face of Sera's drunken tears and she's doing magic she wants to do magic but there are strangers around aren't there, everywhere and that makes it absurdly hard, everything's too real, no one believes in any goddamned thing except doctors, and the only things you can kiss and make better are skinned knees, not sunburnt young men on the edge of heat stroke -
- so Collins suggests the Emergency Room and Sera agrees, of course she does, and perhaps only Collins understands: how far Hawksley has gone and come back and how much will it took to get back in such state but Collins also appears to understand the will it takes Sera to grit her teeth and bend her blonde head and square her narrow shoulders in her rose-covered bustier to join them inside.
She sits with him all night, or at least as much of the night as the French medical personnel will allow, too tense to sleep, not understanding a single one of the jokes Hawksley tells himself because she does not understand any Latin beyond the fragments of the mass that sometimes drift up at the strangest times and in the oddest places and even though these are the strangest times and the oddest places none of those fragments drift up now.
In the hospital, only his glee over his STRAWBERRY MILKSHAKE gets her to crack a smile. It is a tight, lovely little smile. Her arms around her calves and her chin on her left knee and her hair pulled back into a poneytail and her blue eyes strangely sober and she can taste the change in him, can't she, in the air soaring around him, but she can't let herself feel it, not now. Not yet. Not in a place like this.
He's kept overnight and she cannot stay and doesn't want to leave and refuses to leave but she has to and he's just going to sleep with a needle in his arm which scares the fuck out of her and they make her go and Collins drives her back to the hotel and she falls asleep in the SUV and he wakes her when they arrive back at the hotel and learns that Sera is a grumpy little fuck when woken unceremoniously from slumber and almost impossible to awaken, to boot.
--
Sera is settled cross-legged on the bed, with its brocade duvet and fussy plethora of pillows and she was sleeping while Collins fetched Hawksley back from the hospital, curled up to one side of the bed with her arms wrapped around a pillow, having made for herself a very neat little mounded hollow just like she does at home, but she woke as soon as she sensed him, felt his resonance waxing all around her, rising, soaring, right? getting stronger and stronger as Collins brought him round in the SUV and escorted him to the sixth or seventh floor and on and on, and she's wearing a black lace bra and black lace panties (she has spent enough money on lingerie since arriving in Paris to purchase, perhaps, the use of a small army for a solid half-year) beneath one of Hawksley's t-shirts (In the Night Kitchen) that she chose to sleep in and watches Hawksley order his decadent meal and get shaved and trimmed with a gaze that is both somehow bruised and perspicacious and when he grabs her by the hand and waist her legs just unfurl as if they were much, much longer than they are.
He's waltzing her. Her breath catches and she's waltzing with him and all that tension dissolves and who gives a fuck if they knock into a coffee table or three and who gives a fuck that it is an eighteenth century antique (REPRODUCTION. Surely they haul out the reproductions when people who look like Sera are staying in their rooms) and her eyes are on his eyes and she doesn't know what the fuck to say because she has never, never, never ever seen him like this but there's a point mid-dance where she rises to her tiptoes and kisses him, right? This sudden, arresting sort of kiss,
and says, quite simply,
"Show me."
How he flies, of course. How he soars.
Hawksley Rothschild[arete 3: forces 3. vulgar w/o witnesses. base diff: 7 - 1 (quint), -1 (specialized focus), -1 (research: i would say he has done a fuckton) spending WP. need at least 3 successes.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 3, 9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Hawksley Rothschild[hawksley you asshole. not spending more quint.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (3, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )
Hawksley Rothschild[oh right, paradox, whatever.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )
Hawksley Rothschild[soaking that]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 10) ( success x 1 )
Hawksley RothschildHawksley is at least slightly lucid during the milkshake conversation, but he still keeps going into French, because he's hearing so much of it around him, and Latin, because it's filling up his head and he's trying to tell Sera that and only realizing when she looks at him in confusion that he's NOT SPEAKING A LANGUAGE SHE KNOWS, DUMBASS. He tries English again, but forgot what he just said, and ends up failing again, and laughing, and sipping his milkshake and passing out because he's really, really tired.
Murmurs sssseeeerrrraaaa in a singsong when she kisses his brow, having to leave the room because of rules and regulations and no wonder she hates hospitals. He is asleep, but he knows her.
Of course that always makes it worse when he walks away, or leaves, or blathers, or surrenders to a book in a way he doesn't surrender to anything at all.
Anyone.
--
The entire hotel feels a bit like it is lifting from its foundations and floating into the sky while he is inside it. That is the mood, as he demands succulent food and drink, as he wants to pop champagne. Gravity will turn off soon. Is turning off. It feels that way, at least. Any second she'll look out the window and see the city falling away.
He sings about flying. He dances with her, he in jeans and t-shirt, she in lingerie and t-shirt. If he has noticed... the bruises, the bruised-ness, the something, he doesn't let on, which means he may not have noticed it or he is simply being a selfish, narcissistic little fuckstick.
It dissolves. He kisses her neck and her shaved part of her head and her ear and flicks his tongue over her earrings. He's not even trying to get anywhere, not trying to arouse her. He's just tasting her, reacquainting himself, like he's been gone far longer than a couple of days or whatever, like time matters, look at who he's with.
Hawksley smiles as she kisses him. He brightens. He straightens up, and he looks around quickly, and then he puts a finger to his lips. He darts to the door and the windows and he's pulling shades and locking things and laughing to himself as he does so, but then he's back to her, smiling at her, and his eyes are so, so
shining.
"Watch me," he says, like she's not going to. And standing before her again, he makes a gesture with his hands. Complicated, the curve of fingers, the way this tip and that meet, the way they move. He twists something. Lifts it above their heads, winding his long arms to create a circle. The circle falls around them as he drops hands to his sides again. Slowly, very slowly, lifts his hands.
Sera feels it internally even before her skin knows. A shift. It's uncomfortable, in a way. And ethereal. And frightening and pleasurable. She can see it on him, the lifting of his longish hair, the difference in the way his clothes hang on him. Do not hang on him. Nothing hangs. Not between the two of them: the effect is localized. The teacups are safe; the bedspread. The building. But the two of them are rising.
And the truth is, he could do a bit of this before. A shield against gravity, against laws that should not apply to people such as them. It was within his power, though perhaps not on a scale where he would risk bringing Sera into that shield. Or letting them do more than just levitate a bit. They aren't levitating a bit. Gravity is off. It is the only way he can show it to her,
and also share it with her.
He cannot make her fly with him.
--
Her hair has lifted. They are touching the ceiling. Hawksley is laughing. Hawksley has a splitting headache but he's laughing anyway.
SerafíneOf course she's going to watch him because right now there's nothing else to be seen in the room, is there? And they have a view of the Eiffel Tower off the balcony and the green spread of the Tuileries and the grand sweep of the Place de la Concorde with its obelisk there and the Louvre all illuminated in failing sunlight here and he's dancing with her and she's barefoot on the balls of her feet, leaning in as he kisses her, her eyes closed or half-way there, just letting everything whirl away around her,
and he's so bright that when he straightens and drops her hand and darts away to the door she has the absurd thought that she should shield her eyes even as he is closing the doors and pulling the blinds and folding the French doors to the balcony closed, cutting off that view of the city, pulling the shutters tight behind or over them.
His magic is so very different from hers.
--
Sera lets out a breath, a bit giddy, but also somehow unsure. She doesn't really know what is happening and her stomach tightens against the unfamiliar sensation and she opens up her own arms as if she were balancing on a beam , like that might steady her, might make her body feel solid, the way it is meant to feel, rooted or grounded instead of hollow and her own hair is everywhere, like a fright wig and the ceilings here are ridiculously high, and somehow as they are rising to the goddamned ceiling Sera arches her spine and throws her shoulders back just so and does a goddamned flip, just a wholesale spin that wants to keep going and going and going except she gets a bit startled or a bit frightened perhaps and reaches out reflexively to grab Hawksley's hands before the second revolution to stop herself, steady herself and she lets one go but holds on to the other, just settles her hand in his hand and squeezes,
happily,
"That's so fucking amazing - " Sera tells him, biting her lip (yes biting her lip), both enthused and oddly shy. He eyes are shining. If he looks close he might see a few tears on her cheek but he has a splitting headache and he's laughing and all of this is within his goddamned power so looking closely is probably (always) low on Hawksley's list of priorities and anyway, she's also smiling and the light is odd and, "I told you. Remember? Last summer. It was written in your skin, in the air all around you."
Hawksley RothschildOh, he holds her hands. When his have lifted and her hair is flowing upward and outward and everywhere-ward, he slides his hands under hers, palm to palm, to keep her near him. He has some practice at this, but he doesn't look composed, bored, used to it. How can you get used to a feeling like this? Maybe people in space do, because it isn't magic there, it's science. You think you understand it.
Hawksley understands what is happening right now. He has decided that a thing that the whole world agrees upon should not be, at least in this small space. And reality has closed its eyes and surrended to him. So he has a headache. He just overcame a natural law.
Drugs, alcohol, music, dance -- these are not tools of his magic, to bring it to light. The magic itself creates in him an altered state. No wonder he never seems very distracted by... well. Anything else.
Sera slips from him for a moment and flips. Hawksley laughs, and there's no friction in the air to stop her, so he does. He uses the ceiling and he uses his own ability to adjust that shield and propel himself as he wills and takes her hand again. There is no slowing to a stop, but there is no jarring. "You have to ease into it," he says, softly, cautious in a way he rarely is. "You'll throw up everywhere." Practical, sometimes, like he occasionally is.
She squeezes his hand? He squeezes hers back, smiling.
"Yeah," he says, quiet again. "I absolutely remember."
And draws her over, which is so easy. He barely expends effort. The softest tug and there she is, and there his arm is around her waist, and his hand sliding up her forearm, fingers lacing with her fingers. They were waltzing, after all.
SerafíneHawksley tells Sera that she'll throw up everywhere and isn't throwing up everywhere one of her almost-normal states and she's starting to laugh at him, that careful note in his voice, in a tone of voice that is very Sera and very wee and very much I am probably about to do this flipping thing again and again and again until I puke except her stomach just lurches and that feels weird and sick when you're sober and her hands tighten in his because she has the strange, brief, absolute conviction that she is going to fall and it is going to be a long, long way,
except that he has turned off gravity and there is, here, in this bubble of space he has created, in this place where he has told the whole fucking world or at least this tiny slice of it not to do that thing it always does, there is no such thing as falling.
Oh.
He tugs her closer, his arm warm and solid against the small of her back and his hand slides up her forearm, over the black lines of her tattoos and her thumb runs over the meat of his palm as he does so and she tips her head forward so that they can be: brow to brow and nose to nose, her hair startled around them, drifting currents of its own making, like a cloud of seaweed.
"Is it the way you dreamed it would be?"
She does not mean that rhetorically. She means that specifically.
He's dreamed of flying, after all, since he was a baby. So he always says.
Hawksley RothschildThere is no falling. There was never such a thing. And he looks so...
calm, about everything. He looks so content to be up here, one hand lifted to keep his head from bumping against the ceiling, fingertips braced to the molding. He looks settled in a way he hasn't since he walked back into her line of sight and collapsed in a tangled heap of sunburnt limbs and madness. He looks settled in a way she's never seen him. At ease. He's not chasing anything, right now. He doesn't have to, because it's all right here.
Hawksley was never meant to walk the earth, stuck to it the way other people are. His soul is too strong for that, and it fights to be airborne.
--
They are close. And it's been days since they actually felt close. Hawksley is selfish but he's not insensate. He's somewhat narcissistic, but not antisocial. He understands that other people are people. Other people have feelings. He's learned, sometimes with a punch to the face, that his behavior can bruise those feelings. He knows, even if he's forgotten in the past couple of days or even weeks, that there's been a disconnect. Or rather: a straining of the cord, a stretching of the ligament. It aches a little to soothe that strain, ease that tightness, draw back together what has been pulled far, far apart.
Hawksley kisses her beneath her eye.
He smiles faintly at her question.
"Not quite yet," he murmurs, which may tell you something about his dreams. Also true: "And entirely." He says it like a sigh, and kisses the side of her nose. "I'm glad you came with me."
SerafíneSera is quiet as he kisses her: beneath her eyes, along the side her nose, and her eyes are half-closed and she absorbs his smile through the frame of her lashes and feels his steadiness, his calm through her skin, that contentment, which is a strange mantle to sense settled over his shoulders when she knows his drive, and how it is measured sometimes in the pounding of his own heart.
Her brow tightens when he speaks, in this strange shadow of a self-aware smile, and she's nodding, really just tipping her head forward against his, brow to brow, sliding her free arm around his torso, allowing him to hold her both: so very high above the ground and also somehow: in place, and when he says not quite yet it makes her mouth curve for him and it makes her throat ache and it makes her eyes sting and she doesn't know why she never knows why she never asks why because why why why does not matter to her and it hardly matters because she can hear the quick in his voice, the sigh half-withheld, then subsumed in the rest: and entirely which eases that strain without allowing it to abate.
"I was worried about you," this is both quiet and in a rush and if feels like confession, after he tells her that he is glad she came, and she's still kinda nodding to that, and even though her eyes are closed she is also looking a bit off to the side and she breathes ininin. "I'm sorry I know it's stupid you can take care of yourself but I was scared I don't know why."
She wasn't even fucked up, she wants to tell him.
Well, maybe just a little bit fucked up.
"You wouldn't let anyone do anything to you. I know that. I still wanted to, I don't know, protect you and shit."
Sera looks back at him, suddenly. They're still floating, for fuck's sake. It is glorious and lovely and beautifully absurd.
"I'm glad you came back."
Sera cries so easily, sometimes. She's crying now. Just a few tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes.
It's not because she's sad.
"I'm really glad."
HawksleyHawksley is not ready to transcend the pleasures of the flesh in pursuit of the ecstasy of flight. He turns off gravity, he can propel himself through the air, and whether he chooses to show this to Sera right now, he has just tapped into a well of power that earned an entire House of the Order the name of fire. Domus Ignis, Hawksley calls them, preferring the Latin to the French, always.
We digress; Hawksley lives in the tension between longing and ease of longing, the striving for Something More abated gently but not completely by the here-and-now, the relaxation, the comfort, the lovely woman who is touching the ceiling with him, held aloft by his magic and nothing more.
There is trust in this. He does not note it aloud and does not look at her with ache because of it but that doesn't mean he doesn't feel it.
--
Hawksley thinks, the way she looks aside and the way she breathes, that she is going to cry.
Hawksley usually isn't good at such prophecy.
--
What she says makes his brow stitch. That she was worried. And scared. And she knows, she knows, she knows all these things about him and it makes him want to ask her how she knows any of that, does she really believe it, but he doesn't interrupt her. He looks at her, and at her hair wafting in nothing, in the breeze that is not breeze but merely movement; every breath they take creates some amount of propulsion, and there is nothing to stop them in the air.
Now she is crying, and he realizes he was right, he was totally right, he saw the way she was breathing and the way she was not looking at him for a second and he was totally right. And this usually would but does not now give him any joy, just a wry, sad satisfaction.
Hawksley leans to her, touching the back of her head lightly, and kisses each of her cheeks. They have stayed so close. He likes that.
"You have a lot of faith in me," he says, like an echo, not a question or a confirmation, just an observation. Scientific, but not cold. In Hawksley's sciences there is nothing but revelation, nothing but glory, nothing but frustration upon frustration upon frustration, leading only eventually to mastery, and thus to awe.
He kisses her mouth, at the corner, because he cannot help himself. He likes being this close.
"I want you to have faith that I'll come back to you," he says,
not an echo, and not an observation. A very quiet thing, a wish, which may explain why his voice is a whisper, and why his whisper is beside her ear, beneath that upward-flowing canopy of her hair.
There is a difference there, in what he said, how he said it:
come back
to you.
SerafíneThe tears do strange things here, where there is no gravity to pull them down so they leak from the corners of her eyes and then - well. He kisses her cheeks, both of them, and they are not damp and her breath catches in her throat because he makes her forget to breathe sometimes. Forget that her body requires oxygen to fucking function until her lungs burn and she gets wrapped up in that fire until she at last, at least, remembers to breathe again, or maybe that is just autonominic. Some poor series of oft-abused neurons firing in the dark.
So, her breath catches and her grip on him shifts. She slides both arms around his neck, worms them into place, and leaves him the task still of keeping them from bumping into the ceiling.
He tells her that she has a lot of faith in him and everything about her says of course and she smiles, a small smile through the half-shed tears and murmurs beneath / after his echo -
" - because you're fucking amazing."
Which he is.
They're drifting in the air, twelve feet, maybe fourteen feet above the ornate parquet floors of the suite and she is still half-murmuring those words as he kisses the corner of her mouth, so her mouth is moving beneath his, you see, and she wants to turn her mouth into his and kiss him fully and feel the full weight of his mouth on hers while he keeps them there, in a bubble of the world changed because he willed it to change.
He moves, though. Finds her ear, not her mouth, and murmurs a very quiet wish.
Sera's breath catches again. He can feel the hitch of it against his body, the supple convulsion of her shoulders, the way her breasts move against his chest. And it does feel caught, like something was leaking out of her and now the leak is sealed and instead she is strangely expanding and her elbows tighten around his shoulders, and her long-fingered hands find their way into his hair and her voice is all throat-caught, she doesn't trust it so she says nothing in return, or says, perhaps, everything she wants to say with her body, opening her mouth, folding herself into him, nodding, her mouth open, teeth dragging against his jaw as she moves to find his mouth again, to kiss him, fully, openly, tenderly, hungrily on the mouth.
Inhaling him, devouring him, loving him, the best, perhaps the only, way she knows.
(She is crying the whole time.)
HawksleyShe's so wrong, though. About him taking care of himself, about him not letting anyone do anything to him. When has that been tested? How does she think these things of him?
All he can think is that she's so wrong, and she's so perfect, and that her arms moving on his sunburnt shoulders causes pain, and that somehow that pain and that faith and that perfection and that wrongness make him very, very hard.
There is also something to be said for the fact that, by his power alone, they are kissing on the ceiling.
--
They are kissing. Because he kept kissing her face and touching her hair, and because she wept, and then she was touching him, eating him, coming at him as though he hasn't been anywhere near her for days and days and not just... well. A few days. His hands are roaming up her back. He is finding fastenings with a deftness and patience that you wouldn't expect from him, or expect her to tolerate.
Clothing drifts, and then finds itself outside of whatever space he has created here and ends up dropping, noisily, to the floor. A few items stay close: a bracelet he eases off of her wrist, the underwear he draws down her thighs. They are standing, weightless, but his feet touch her feet, and he sweeps her off of them, in another sense, or simply 'again'. Of course when her back touches the ceiling it's a soft fall; and when he is over her he is also beneath her, and he is smiling, and his hair is askew, and he smiles even if she is crying,
because he knows what sort of crying this is not.
He does tell her, later, whisperingly, to stop crying. it's okay. it's okay. but by then he is pressing his hand to the ceiling, and clutching at it the way he might pull at sheets if they had any, and his mouth is dissolving into a kiss against her neck instead, and the air around them shudders with momentary friction as he almost, almost loses his concentration.
He doesn't. Or he does, and grabs hold of it again, quickly, snatching it back up again. Holds her there between his body and the ceiling, the ceiling their only guard between their bodies and the sky.
--
Later, he lets himself down first. Descends slowly to the top of the high, cushioned bed they've shared night after night, and holds her hand, and eases her down, placing himself in a spot where he can catch her if his control slips again, if his power shudders.
It doesn't. Gravity's reassertion is gentle, but somehow still feels jarring. Her hair falls, and her feet press into the bed, and Hawksley looks very, very lightheaded, but that has nothing to do with magic. It has everything to do with the way he kisses her again then, harder than before, as though he -- surprising himself more than anyone -- missed the friction, the weight, the heaviness of mortality.
The bed, then. And he wants her above him this time.
Or again.
He really isn't sure which it is.
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