[How awake are we?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )
Kalen Holliday[And how distracted by Resonance are we?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )
SerafíneIt is evening-going-into-night and this local summer festival (which is called in all honesty and actuality SummerFest) has spread itself all over the northern half of Washington Park. There's a main stage and a not-main stage and a "No-Fi Porch" where people play acoustic sets of everything from old-fashioned honest to god bluegrass to Nirvana covers on mandolins and there are food trucks and craft stalls and the odd side-show attraction, the occasional games of skill and chance. The food trucks run the gamut from hipster to Minnesota state fair and there's alcohol for sale and it is Colorado so of course there's pot - legal pot - fucking everywhere, the musty smell wafting up to the goddamned heavens and it is a Saturday night and this goes on for not one but two fucking Friday-Saturday-Sunday weekends and the grass is already trampled into the earth and there are people on the lawn in front of the main stage who have been camping out there and getting fucking stoned since 11 a.m. watching the bands and the local belly dance troupes or hip hop crews who take the stage between the acts and during the long, sun-baked day, this mellow feeling of community has settled the park and everyone is more than a bit sweaty and a little bit dirty and a little bit sunburnt and a little bit high.
Serafíne has been back in the country for less than twenty-four hours. She is jet-lagged and high and hardly understands where she is right now. She told Dan some slippery tale about a nymph and her little dog and golden threads buried in the grass the goats eat at the Tuileries, and does he know what she did on the ceiling? which made Dan wonder if she was also tripping.
She was not tripping. She was happy to see him and now she's here and she may or may not have slept but she isn't the sort to follow any sort of conventional diurnal pattern so that's fine.
There's a little lull on the stage at the No-Fi cabin. One act is done, they've gotta go, there's a bus to Provo, Utah they have to catch and the next singer-songwriter (one of Dan's friends) isn't here quite yet and the belly dancers don't grace this stage with their presence and anyway this is a porch, and the crowd is a little bit bored and a little bit restless so,
someone hands Dan a guitar and he drags Sera up with him and they do this laughing, lazy, infectious acoustic cover of the Pixies' Gigantic.
Sera seems like she's falling into the verses (lovely legs they are) and falling apart, but when the chorus comes, it is bright, shouted, assured, and everyone in the audience joins in ("gigantic, gigantic, gigantic/ a big big love") again and again and again, and the whole thing ends with the reappearance of the next act and Sera, bright and breathless, stumbling down the steps of the porch, telling someone that she wants a fucking beer.
Kalen HollidayKalen isn't sure exactly when he got here.
He's spent the last few days trying to let go of attachments or live in the moment, but has mostly succeeded in being the least focused person at most gatherings. Maybe not so much this one. He keeps meeting people, or at least encountering them, and he makes...well as much sense as the other people here who are stoned.
And there is Sera. Breathless and caught in some limitless, endless second of possibility. She could step out of it anywhere. She would like to step out of this one, or one very near this one, with a beer. He can help with that. He manages to secure a beer, and he isn't paying attention to what kind of beer beyond unopened. He showed up with nothing really, he's been getting handed things and usually handing people cash back. Or something back.
And so he offers Sera a beer, and his catch on the knotted hemp and bead bracelets someone has tied onto his wrist. There are a lot of them. Maybe more than one someone. He'll have to find out later. Hold them in his hands and breathe smoke over them and see where they came from. Or wait and see if he gave the person or people they came from his number. They might call.
Sera. Did Sera tie them onto him? Mo...that doesn't sound right. There is something about Sera.
About to step out into an impossible limitless second. No.
Yes, but no. He is handing her a beer. That is what is happening with Sera.
"Hi."
SerafíneSera arrived here wearing a black leather jacket over a bra (black lace in a simple, sea-shell pattern - extraordinarily fine framed in by a pink silk band) and a rather short, rather plaid, rather pleated madras skirt, and her usual fishnets and heels but heels are ridiculously things to wear on the grass under any circumstances but especially these: when the sun is failing and the night is gathering and the crowds have churned up a layer of mud beneath the grass and on and on and on and on,
so she has not got heels on anymore and is wandering around almost-barefoot (fishnets, you see), which means she is also shorter than anyone who knows her ever seems to remember or expect because she is so fucking insistent about wearing those ridiculous heels and somehow, somehow, you just expect her to be tall, to be towering.
And though she started out the day or evening or whatever with a leather jacket on it was so fucking hot that she shed the leather jacket some time ago and she's hot. There's sweat sliding down the hollow defined by her spine, damp all over her torso, darkening both the roots and the ends of her blonde curls, glistening over the sort fringe she always sports, and there's Kalen, and Kalen has a beer for her and she takes the beer (easily, naturally) in one hand and slides her other arm through Kalen's as if she had not been out of the country for two and a half months, and tips her temple to his shoulder and straightens and looks right at his profile and inhales,
happily. Present: everything.
"Hi." She says, and "Thanks," for the beer, you know, and she tips up the bottom edge of the bottle by way of example, then touches the cold glass to her temple because she's fucking hot, and "Didja miss me?"
SerafínePerception + Awareness-as-empathy. What is up with you, Kalen?
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1
Kalen HollidaySera links an arm through his and there is a second where Kalen, usually easy enough about contact, seems to hesitate about it. It's only a second, and then he relaxes into it, He even smiles a little, although the smile seems...not forced, just slightly disconnected.
"I did miss you." And that is true. There were moments in an alternate reality and moments after it where he would have given nearly anything to see her. He could not have brought himself to bring Sera out into the desert with him, Sera who could have and might have looked to see what happened there. But he still would have liked to have had her there.
For someone who spent about half the time Sera was gone in a coma, Kalen looks pretty good. He's thin, but he always has been. And pale, but he has always been that too. But there are, if you look (and Sera has), hints of something traumatic and lingering and heavy. Not the old echoes and scars he has always had, but something fresher. Newer. Still bleeding a bit.
And he is a bit stoned, but more than that, all the focus Sera has seen, all that training that forces his attention into something hard and sharp...he isn't doing that right now. And to Kalen, Kalen who gets lost in visions and nightmares and futures that might be...that lack of focus plays out in a dramatic contrast to all that control.
SerafíneThey are sliding into the crowd. Strange the way that works. People move around them - opening, see, then closing, in this way that feels both ordinary and wholly organic. It all seems linked and bound. The next act is on the stage now, a winsome young woman with a deep voice and a sure hand on the twelve-string acoustic guitar she is tuning up, and Sera was going to stay with Dan and watch her but she has forgotten that, or perhaps she has decided to remember Kalen instead. Maybe there's something more important here.
This is how they walk: her right arm through his left. The dark fuzz of her shaved fringe is closer to him than the wild mass of her long curls, which instead crown and frame her shadow against the shifting crowd and the painted sky. Sera is looking up at Kalen with that odd combination of fucked-up, tender, intensity she sometimes displays.
Notes his thin-ness.
Notes his pallor.
Notes the new cloud of lingering trauma.
The way he seems just out of sync, out of step with his usual watchful paranoia.
Sera - alas - does not check Ginger faithfully. Sometimes, she does not check Ginger at all.
She has no idea Kalen was in a coma,
but, she sees the rest of it. Breathes it in, the cloud over him, and she would greet all that distraction, the lessening of his usual-guard with the humming pleasure with which she would greet the relaxation of any of her friends' ordinary walls, but this feels new and dis rather than connected and Sera rises up to the balls of her nearly-bare feet and closes her eyes and plants a kiss on the apex of Kalen's cheek. She stays close a moment. Close enough that her lashes brush his skin when she opens her eyes to take him in from this distance, perspective flattened to the immediate, so close that her brain refuses to resolve the vision of two eyes into one, so she sees him piecemeal. In pieces.
"Two options," Sera murmurs to him, "One, I get you so blind fucking drunk you forget about it so one brilliant night. Or, two. You take me somewhere and we talk until dawn. It's all up to you. I don't care which you choose, but you're picking a goddamned one of them."
She's already been awake for more than twenty-four hours.
She doesn't fucking care.
Kalen HollidayKalen studies her, and for a second there is a lingering echo of all that control. So much training. He smiles, this time sad but slightly more present, and he says very softly, "I can't be that drunk. There are things I have to remember.
"So...the second one. This is still Washington Park, right?" He glances around. "I haven't ended up at some completely different music festival already?" He is mostly joking. Mostly. But he also glances around to check. He left his house to go to a party in a warehouse and then...well and then he got back in touch with sixteen-year-old Kalen who had a different Name and a different life. Which means he hasn't been home since Thursday, though he has been in other people's homes.
"Do you need anything before we leave?"
Serafíne"if you ever wanted to get that drunk," Sera returns, voice low, her eyes dark - first on his profile and then on his own pale eyes, as he studies her. "I'd remember all that bullshit for you. I'd build a wall or a fucking moat or a bridge or whatever the fuck you needed, you know? To let go."
Then she drops her chin, drops her cheek to his shoulder and turns, quick-made, quick-formed, glances back over her left shoulder and raises her left hand by way of farewell, to poor Dan who only just got her back, and will have to spend the rest of the evening without her.
"This is still Washington Park. I don't know what festival you meant to attend but I recognized the fucking boathouse and the goddamned lakes. There's nothing else I need. Let's go."
Kalen HollidayAs Sera puts her cheek to his shoulder he drops his head so that it touches hers. "I...left for the night on Thursday, and crashed somewhere with people coming here. I didn't exactly mean to come here. I just...got here."
He does not tell her that she cannot remember those things for him, that those things are less true memory and more reflex. That he needs to know where the entrances are, where danger might come from and what his avenues of escape might be. He needs to remember where his weapons are. The Words that, if everything else fails, can be used as weapons. And Sera, for the same reasons he could not bring her to the ruined chantry, cannot be the person who remembers those things so that he does not have to. Not because he does not think she is strong enough, but because he knows exactly what it costs.
He won't let her do it for him.
"Let's go," he echoes, and he leads her toward the street to hail a cab.
Serafíne"I didn't precisely mean to end up in Paris for two fucking months," Sera returns, and Kalen does not tell her that it is the vigilence he must remember, the Names of things, and how to turn words into weapons, and Sera does not understand what such vigilance entails, or how one even begins to cultivate such habits, and the truth is she would be terrible at it, fucking terrible, she would be - well and truly - on the absolute border of incompetent at anything that required such care, such precision, such guarded vigilance.
This is what she does instead. Drink down half a beer at a go and gasp, coming up for air as Kalen steers them toward a street and come up laughing, lifting the index finger of her left hand, explaining to Kalen drunkenly as they walk, thread their way through the crowds, " - it was supposed to be three days but then fuck if I could leave. You know?
"That time you lost from Thursday 'til now. Was it good time?"
Then they're on the sidewalk. Sera stands in the grass behind the curb while Kalen hails the cab, having untucked both arm and body from his to give him the space and freedom to perform that particular party trick. But soon enough a cabbie sees him signaling and a yellow cab slides over in the darkness backgrounded by the strains of music from the main stage.
They get in. Sera first; if Kalen feels like handing her in to the cab she allows herself to be handed in. If not, well, she's perfectly capable of climbing in on her own. When the cabbie asks them Where to?, she lets Kalen answer.
Takes over only if he doesn't.
Kalen HollidayKalen nods, partly because he knows what it's like to be unexpectedly somewhere longer than intended and because the time has been good. "I ran into Ian and Elijah on Thursday, but mostly just new people." New people he will probably never call. Some of them might regret that, and (in places of his mind that he so rarely goes) Kalen might regret that. But what would he bring them but danger? Blood and darkness are too drawn to drawn to him. Or he to them. Or each to the other, like magnetic forces. Kalen doesn't know exactly how or why his fate and death and violence and tragedy are so entwined, but he knows that they are. At least the other Magi know enough to protect themselves a little. Mundane people.....
Kalen lets Sera climb into the cab, gives the cabbie an address not far from the chantry, and then settles beside Sera. "This one time," he says. "I went to spend the night with this couple and stayed with them for like two years. That was kind of incredible. This was...pretty great, but a lot less...." He frowns. Because there are a lot of words that are wrong, and few that seem right. "Permanent."
SerafíneAnd Sera nods like she knows precisely what he means, though she doesn't, not really, but there's something about being more than a little bit stoned and more than a little bit jetlagged and perhaps a tiny little bit drunk on top of that (she still has the beer he brought her, handed her, really, more than half-drunk now, nestled between her thighs) that just makes you understand what someone else is saying, vibe on it, find the horizon point where their truth can become your truth, even if it is just momentary.
Sera in the cab is - just a bit restless, too. That's the jet lag. The exhaustion crawling all itchily through her limbs that she's ignoring. The crown of her head against the back of the seat, then her brow against the glass.
"Sometimes you don't even fucking know, you know? What's going to say with you or where you're going to stay or how they work together or how you pull them apart. I'm glad it was a good lacuna, though."
Then, she's beckoning him over to the window, pointing out the pointillist impression of the park, both lit-up and peeled back, all those strangers, the blasted wash of lights from the main stage, starting to dwindle as they drive: past, then away.
The taste of something on her tongue.
--
The ride out to the chantry - or the address near the chantry - takes a solid half-hour even at this hour, with traffic light-to-minimal on the feeder roads and expressways. Sera makes a kind of smalltalk, enthusing to Kalen about Paris and listening to whatever stories he might tell her in turn. Clean stories, right, safe and simple ones in the cab, where the cabbie can overhear. So Sera tells Kalen about the Eiffel Tower and the Seine and Laudure and the hot tub boat and Sacre Couer and shopping and Hawksley is regularly featured in these stories except in the hearing of the cab driver, Sera calls him Davie.
Kalen HollidayKalen listens to her talking about Paris, about safe things that are not monsters or nightmares. He doesn't have memories like that, of just going to a mundane place and doing mundane things for months. Seeing places that normal people go to see. He imagines that once he probably wanted to visit Disney World or something, but that life was a long time ago. But he listens to Sera now, and now, when he's embracing moments more than duties and the way possibility seems to hover in some lingering space between what is and what could be, his expression softens into something wistful.
There are not many return stories, because Kalen had the wrong kind of childhood, the wrong kind of Awakening, the wrong kind of training for that. But he does tell her, quietly and almost shyly, about wandering through Santiago with Ramon. There is a cabbie there, and he can hear, so the parts about magic are left out, the parts about how he came to be barely able to walk so that Ramon had to half carry him sometimes are left out, and especially the part about Ramon being a priest are left out. He tries to leave out the part about being hopelessly in love, but really, you can't know Kalen and not hear that when he talks about Ramon.
They step out in the parking lot of two rectangular buildings, one an office and one a warehouse. Kalen leads Sera to the warehouse, which is not actually the entrance to an underground bunker. The part he takes her in through was offices and is now living space, full of used furniture in earth tones. "I have an actual house," he says, half-apologetically. "It's just that this girl is living there right now, and she doesn't know...anything." He shrugs.
"Do you want coffee or anything?"
SerafíneSera's chatter creates this bright, bauble-filled babble, really. There is Lauduré and fondue and hot French waiters and crepes and lights! and Le Grand Roue and Versailles and dancing fountains and swimming underwater aboveground, which is how she describes the eight huge Monets in the Orangerie. They went to the Moulin Rouge and all the clubs around Pigalle and the Moulin Rouge is a tourist trap to the Nth degree but there are dancing girls and Sera - who spent thousands upon thousands of Euros on artwork from the galleries in St. Germain de Pres and clothing and lingerie and jewelry at the shops up and down the Rue Royal or in the Haute Marais is still beautifully fixated on the cheap 15 Euro ceramic reproduction of the Moulin Rouge.
And she listens to Kalen's stories, the few he tells, about Santiago. Watches the supple softness in his features as he does so. The note of shyness, the echo of love.
Both make her smile, and her own smile is not wistful,
though it is lovely.
Fine, and sweet, and utterly lovely.
--
By the time they get there, Sera has finished her beer. She leaves the bottle behind in the cab. It's rude, really, and the driver will have to recycle it or maybe the next passenger with see it rolling around in the floor but she just doesn't think about such things.
--
Inside, that half-apology shot-through his tone. Sera gives this errant little shrug. The sweat on her skin dried in the cab - the driver was blasting the a/c - and her hair's starting to frizz, all tumbled and out of place, and she left her shoes behind somewhere at the park so she costume looks rather urchin-like if urchins paired expensive French bras with silk skirts and fishnets so, not especially urchin-like at all.
"It's cool." Sera assures Kalen, brows arched, looking around, taking everything in, "I don't know where I imagined you living but it wasn't a place like this. Don't really want coffee, but I wouldn't say no to a fucking beer.
"Or something harder, if you've got it."
Kalen Holliday"There's a whole bar, but mostly everyone ignores it for the coffee. I'll get us a bottle of something. Do you have a preference?"
"I live...I don't even know. Sometimes here. Sometimes the office. Even before Kelsey, never really in the house. I stay other places sometimes. I haven't lived in just one place since I lived in a chantry. But that was a long time ago." Two entire years ago. It seems like lifetimes.
"Before that...I moved around a lot. And before that I had a place to live, but I never really was there. And before that...was a really long time ago." Many years and Names ago. "I had...a kinda unusual childhood. I never thought so. But...other people seem to." Other people think Kalen had a horrible childhood, not an unusual one. but if you trade out those words the statement becomes entirely true.
Serafíne"Tequila if you have limes - " Sera tells Kalen, with this supple thread of a smile gracing her curving mouth. She's shaking a hand through her hair, circling the couches until she finds the one that feels right and sinks down, throwing an arm up over the spine and watching Kalen as he heads toward the bar. "Whiskey if you don't. Especially if you've got some fucking Stranahans.
"I don't drink coffee. Not much. Not really. Dan makes me tea in the mornings.
"Half the time I dose it with whiskey."
--
Head tipped back, Sera watches Kalen, quiet for a moment. While he tells her that he never really - lived - anywhere. That he doesn't really have a home.
"Is that because you need to move around to feel safe?" This, when he returns, and she's reaching out to accept whatever drink he has brought her. "Or because you don't want to feel safe? Or because you can't quite bring yourself to be vulnerable enough to know what home feels like?"
Kalen HollidayKalen returns with a bottle of tequila and a handful of limes and a knife. He offers Sera the bottle and starts to slice limes, unconcerned by the fact that lime juice is dripping onto the table or that he's slicing limes he's holding in his hand.
"I guess I had a home until I was like six. I remember it, a little. I only know it was then because I can remember my sister. It was me and her and my mom then. And I think we were happy. I remember being happy." He offers Sera a slice of lime and sets the other slices of lime on the table. "She drowned though. Just after I turned six. And my mother...." He shrugs. "Some ghosts still have a pulse, I guess. I stayed away as much as I could. I mean, I had to go back sometimes. Someone had to bring food and stuff.
"But then I Awakened and I went home with Kharisma and Jack. And I never slept there anymore. I would bring her things sometimes. But I lived with Kharisma and Jack and we moved a lot because we kinda had to. It was good though, I mean...they're really great. And then when they had to leave the country for awhile they broght me to the Hermetic chantry, and I lived there for a few years.
"And then it exploded. And I ended up in Santiago. But I couldn't stay there. I mean...there are people who want to kill me. I couldn't....
"And then I ended up here. I've just never really been in a place to have a home most of the time. And now I kind of am, except the concept is really alien to me. I think Kelsey likes the house house though. And the puppy. So...it's kind of like a real home now, just not for me. Which is good, I guess. I think it likes being a real home and not a house."
SerafíneThere's something disjointed about the way anyone remembers childhood. Everyone remembers childhood. Time had a different sort of meaning, then. Every day was fucking new and time gets measured by the strangest of milestones, and sometimes those milestones are simply: Before and
After.
--
Sera takes the lime slices and licks the back of her hand for salt and takes the bottle of tequila and belts back a shot-or-three at a go and comes up for air and bites down on her slice of lime, inhaling, deliciously bright, between pieces of the story Kalen tells her. The strangest juxtaposition but the tequila hits her blood quickly since she's had nothing to eat since the fucking plane and it all makes her feel warm and shivery or maybe that is something in the story Kalen is telling her - the shivery part - and there's just so much that he is saying and it is hard, almost impossible, for Sera to hear any of that without tears springing to her eyes so there are tears, unshed, all gleaming over her irises while it all goes on and on and one.
"Why can't it be a real home to you - because Kelsey's not awake? My housemates aren't either, but that's still my home."
Kalen Holliday"What? Oh. Well. Maybe. One day." He settles onto the couch. "I don't really know Kelsey. I sort of just didn't know what to do with her. We kinda met while I was trying to her and her ex out of committing armed robbery. She listened. He didn't. He ran and she was standing there crying and I just...she had tried to grab a gun pointed at me which probably would have gotten her shot and I was kind of...I wasn't even thinking. I just took her with me. I didn't know what else to do."
He blinks. "Hey. It's okay. People get so upset but I had a really awesome childhood. I got to explore sewers and go on actual adventures. It was the best. Some pretty bad things happened, but most of it was incredible. Flagstaff...." He shudders. "Happened. And that was horrible, but...sometimes we live in a horrible world. While we're here, we try to make it better, yeah? I think we're doing okay. We got to help the Message and the spirit of the little boy, and there was that Umbrood spirit we stopped and everything.
"That's what we're for. Sometimes...sometimes that's what we die for. A better world. But it's worth it. It's okay." His voice only shakes a little as he pronounces that that is all okay.
SerafíneDoesn't it all sound like someone reciting a mantra, like a man trying to sell himself before he sells his mark. Like a guy rehearsing for a fucking interview on the sidewalk outside, imagining the questions and answers, the call and response, the tricky bits strangers will -
Sera does another shot. Of course she does. The alcohol makes her eyes sting and she follows it with another mouthful of sliced lime and then lifts her head back, inhaling as the room spins, and slows, and stops. The back of her head is on the back of the couch, and her eyes are on him, still damp - he's not escaping that. Sera feels what she feels and she's not going to stop feeling it because Kalen has decided to tell her that all that awful stuff he just told her isn't that awful because there's amazing stuff in the world too.
She knows that. She knows that.
Sometimes it is the amazing stuff that makes her cry.
--
"It is okay," Sera echoes Kalen, and reiterates, and she means it and says it - not shakily - but with a fucking conviction that feels shot-through regardless of the tears in her eyes. She has reached out to take one of Kalen's hands, or maybe both, and she squeezes his palm between her thumb and the bent knuckle of his forefinger. "It's not a fucking math problem, either. The good weighed against the bad. It's just: who and what and where we are, you know?
"It's all okay. You're not, though. What's going on?"
Kalen HollidayKalen studies Sera for a few seconds. Her hands wrapped around his. The taste of their Resonance mingling into something electric and visceral and never still on the back of his tongue. Tears that aren't falling from her eyes. For a second he considers that this was a mistake, that Sera should not be here with him to feel this. That one of them experiencing it is enough.
But she chose, didn't he? She had looked at him and she chose. He can remember how certain she sounded. Determined. If he can chose to fight, and suffer, and almost certainly one day die for a world he approaches more as an abstract concept then Serafine can make her own choices about whose pain she'll let wash over her.
And so after that pause he smiles faintly. "Is this not alright? It seems...unsteady maybe. But I thought it was okay." The smile flickers, widens, fades. "I guess I wouldn't have any real idea. I don't have easy points of comparison to anything normal. Just...a lot of chaos and then a lot of training and then a lot of hiding.
"I don't know where anything starts. The past and the present and the future get tangled up in each other. They're not cleanly separated and strictly linear. Now is a weird jumbled mess of the scent of ink and the taste of smoke and the world blurring and spinning and shooting Seth and being bitten and the end of the world and a shotgun blast that didn't happen because it did but then I saw it and that changed everything. I don't know how to do this.
"I don't understand people. Not...I can manipulate their responses. But I don't understand how to connect with them and then stay connected. So...I don't really know what to do with your question.
"I sort of tried with Ian. That was beautiful in the way of tigers and cobras. Beautiful and intense and not warm. He wouldn't let me call him kitty-cat. He fought me every time I tried to just turn him into an idea instead of a person. He was the most real thing I ever really even almost had."
SerafíneSera listens and she listens in strange ways and she's breathing as she listens and she, herself, does not have any easy points of comparison to anything normal what does she give a fuck about normal but she's sitting there, tequila bottle resting on her left thigh, the fingers of her right hand wrapped loosely around its neck, the fingers of her left hand wrapped around the meat of Kalen's hand - not clutching at him precisely, but there's contact and there's connection and some things are always painful and a few of the tears in Sera's eyes have brimmed, you see, crested and spilled through her lower lashes and she hardly notices, really.
She even smiles - just a bit - this sad, lovely, curving half-smile, when he tells her that nothing is normal, nothing was ever normal, and he thought he was okay, right? even though he loses the thread of the present amidst those of the past and the future, that he does not tell the story he is going to tell front to back but also: sideways and inside out, and sideways and inside out come forth in a blur of images that she does not and cannot understand. She does not know where he was or what he went through - just that he doesn't know how to do this, any of this, whatever this may be, and as he goes on she's still quiet, he tells her that he doesn't understand people, the fundamental facts about how to connect and the stay connected so he just doesn't understand the question,
which was - basically - let me in.
--
That's when she moves. This, you see, is an interruption. the way she rises, to her left knee - untangling her hand from his hand and reaching to cup the back of his skull - the fine, pale hair. The fine, pale skin.
Sera kisses Kalen's temple and it is not like a kiss it is like a blessing, the sort the gods bestow, except that it lingers, and her breath is humid and her skin smells like sweat and smoke and fucking Chanel Number 5 because the girl cannot bloody help herself.
--
Then she leans back, and this time her arm is slung across the back of the couch, and a few of her fingers linger in his hair.
"What is it you want from Ian - or think you want from Ian - that he's not giving you?"
Kalen HollidayKalen's eyes close when she presses her lips to his temple. He breathes in the scent of her. Of the tequila. He wonders if there will be the scent of her clinging to his skin in the morning.
"So, the first time I fell in love, it was a girl who was pretending to be someone else. And, I think that we still loved each other, still love each other really. She saved me. When the chantry exploded. I guess I saved her first, but she did save me. She left me after that, because she couldn't really run with me while I was unconscious, but she tried. And that might sound like a thing people do, but she...she didn't really save people at all. Not when it could cost her so much. Certainly not without having negotiated for something in return.
"But she wasn't exactly who I thought she was, so that was kind of strange.
"And then I started a thing with my first two mentors when they came back to town, and I love that. It's amazing. But...they're in love. They love me too, but...I'm something they do sometimes. And that's okay, I always knew that and they are really great about being around as much as they can be.
"I fell in love with this Catholic priest. And, that's...fucking beautiful. But he...vows, you know. So. That's...well, really kind of like Kharisma and Jack, except he's not in an open relationship with God at all.
"People love me. I know that. And it's ridiculous and selfish, but I just wanted to fall in love with someone who isn't pretending to be someone else or already in a life-defining relationship who could just...I wanted something that was real and not just at the edges of something else. And I know I have vows and oaths and all kinds of things of my own. It wouldn't even be a little fair.
"I just want it anyway."
SerafíneSera's eyes are dark and they are quick on Kalen's face, you understand, attuned. That glisten of tears still damp and visible in the gloss of her gaze, but after the first few christened her lashes, smeared a bit of her ever-present dark mascara, there have been no more. Kalen closes his eyes and breathes in her sent and tells Serafíne about love and a certain kind of love, a very particular kind of love and the many ways he has fallen into some version of that sort of love. A natural history of love: the girl who was pretending (and behind that: the painful story of which Sera is still but half-away, explosions against the darkness. Tragedy: loss); the other folks, already in love with each other, when they came back in town. The priest, and on and on.
Sera listens; just - listens. Creates a space where Kalen can speak and listens as he does so, and she watches him, not just his eyes but the smear of his profile around the background of the warehouse - this, his mildly impersonal homestead - with couches and the promise of coffee and a full bar, somewhere close.
"Who gives a fuck about fair." Sera opines, philosophical see, her mouth a still, lovely curve that is somehow just on the edge of haunted, though perhaps tonight she is haunted by his ghosts and not her own. "You wanted to fall in love with someone who was also falling in love with you.
"That's harder than it sounds. Why Ian?"
Her fingertips are still soft in his hair.
Kalen HollidayKalen laughs. "Because-"
"He's so present. Like he's anchored in the present and in himself. Because I thought that in any given crisis he'd leave me and get the hell out. Because he's beautiful and I won't lie, the sex is phenomenal.
"I'm not what he wants. I don't even know what he wants, but it isn't me. And that's okay." He smiles again, and for a second his eyes glimmer with tears that don't really spill. "I'm really good at not taking that so badly. People are other people or committed to each other or committed to God or they want things from you you can't give them and I understand all those things.
"I was crazy to want that anyway. I knew-" He sighs and leans into her fingertips.
He did not list her in the litany of people he has fallen in love with. Perhaps he doesn't want to let that lie between them. Perhaps he's not really entirely aware of it.
"Everything got really intense in that alternate reality. It was...horrible. I ran into him just after I had to shoot this kid who was turning into a zombie and everything was horrible and then Sid hated me and I just...it wasn't...and then the world was ending. And then we were here and he was so glad I was here and then everything got weird and at least he doesn't hate me and we're fine just not...." He shrugs. "Not in love.
"Which makes sense. I mean. I don't even know him, really."
Serafíne"And that's okay." He smiles again, and for a second his eyes glimmer with tears that don't really spill. "I'm really good at not taking that so badly. People are other people or committed to each other or committed to God or they want things from you you can't give them and I understand all those things."
How okay, really? Perception + Awareness-as-empathy.
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 4, 4, 4, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1
Kalen HollidaySo, Kalen is weirdly sad that he has realized he doesn't know Ian, and therefore isn't in love with him. He's maybe a little sad Ian doesn't love him, but most of that sadness and loneliness is less specific. He isn't upset that Jenna was actually like three times older than he thought and a different person, he isn't sad that Kharisma and Jack have their thing, he isn't sad that Ramon took vows of celibacy; more, it's that every time he seems to end up on the outside of everything. He's more upset that he spends so much time alone, than directly upset about anyone in particular.
SerafíneO.
Her mouth rounds with that worldless syllable, which is mostly unvoiced but still there is a strange little noise that Sera makes when Kalen is smiling, while his eyes glimmer with unshed tears.
She has never seen him -
No, she has never imagined -
You see she is so very much on the cusp of things and then he is on the cusp of tears and aren't there tears in her eyes, isn't she always just ready for it all - the pain and the loveliness and the places between them, which seem to be constructed of three-fifths of both, which makes everything more than whole. So,
O.
Serafíne is jetlagged and has not really slept in upwards of thirty-six hours now except for a fitful nap somewhere over the eastern seaboard. Yesterday she was across an ocean today she was across an ocean and here she is again and everyone is still here and she said goodbye to Hawksley and kissed Dan and Dee and even Rick and Emily Honey-Bunches-of-Chokes hello again and there was SummerFest, what a ridiculous fucking name geniuses, SummerFest, and the sun was setting but the air was still laden with heat and there was Kalen, not precisely broken-hearted, but
- lonely. A little bit sad. Beneath all that okay in a way that makes her a bit sadder, that makes her ache, you see, quietly for him, and Sera does not hide from that ache - when her heart hurts, she feels it, the same way she feels everything else.
"Oh, Kalen." Her bodyweight shifts. Sera lifts that bottle of tequila from her thigh and pulls her leg up onto the couch. "It's not crazy to want that. There's nothing wrong with wanting that." Knee beneath her, she half-rises and reaches for him. Cups the back of his skull and bends to plant a kiss on first his brow, then his temple.
"Tell me you know that." The last bit murmured into his pale hair.
Then she's sinking back down, though he can come with her if he wants. Lean against her shoulder, for strength or comfort or communion, feel her breath rise and fall. Hell, if he wanted to cry, she'd hold him until his shoulders stopped shaking. Until the ache of it all left his throat.
"And with someone like Ian, it's so easy you know, to paint whatever it is you want to see onto that surface, because he works so hard to stay aloof. How the fuck are you supposed to get to know him?" The smallest of shrugs, "I don't know. He's always seemed like kind of a dick to me."
Kalen HollidayAs before, his eyes close when she presses her lips to his skin. "I know it is very human," Kalen says softly, as though this kind of longing should be something he can just let lie somewhere quiet and out of the way, someplace full of light filtered through dust motes and a trackless layer of those dust motes over everything like unbroken snow. Hidden away and forgotten.
It is not a sentiment entirely out of place among the Order, this kind of resolve to focus on duty to the exclusion of everything else. Or power, Kalen would admit. Or pride. But Serafine has seen him Working, has been part of that of that his Will and her Will entwining and colliding and interweaving. He doesn't Work much like anyone from the Order, heavy on intricate rituals and symbols, because the world he sees isn't really theirs. He's caught between Traditions in that respect, for all you can't taste their edges and the space framed by it in his essence the way you can feel it rippling and drifting off Serafine, Tangling itself in his hair or her hair or the branches of trees like dew on spider webs that reflects myriad possible worlds.
He does settle with her and he shudders once, but he does not cry. There is a second where he wants to tell her what he told Ian, about people and crying, but that moment seems like something that needs to stay secret. Kalen might be willing to be that vulnerable before Sera, but he doubts Ian is. Instead he sighs.
"I gave up, you know. I was trapped in a place I knew wasn't real like here is real and I had had to do horrible things, and it didn't help that maybe those thing weren't real people because it was real enough and I thought they were real at the time. I had found Sid, but then that went terribly, and then I had a vision and I tried...." He sighs again. "All the specifics of it don't matter. I was just going to stay there, in the horrible other world ruined version of the House. He made me get up and leave with him. He's a lot of things, and not all of them are gentle or kind, but he could have left. He didn't. Sid just left, both of us, she didn't even say goodbye.
"But he's the one the one who tried to save me. Maybe he did, but I think the starlight creature would have saved me somehow."
SerafíneKalen settles against her and Sera wraps her arms around him. She still has the fucking tequila bottle in one hand and no, she's not putting it down, and yes, she takes a drink. A swig. No lime this time and no salt, just burn. The butt of the bottle is cold and solid and rests probably somewhere close to the middle of his spine, where her arms meet and Sera shifts her grip on the bottle from one hand to the other and drops her lovely and sharp little chin to rest it thoughtfully on the crown of Kalen's head, where he is clasped against her shoulder.
She smells like tequila and sunrise and jet fuel and cloves and sweat and - remember - Chanel No. 5 beneath it all and she feels smaller than you imagine she should be. Something about her, some gravitational pull, some shouting goddamned insistence - always makes her seem like she should take up more room in the world than she does.
Kalen tells her more about that horrible other world, fragmentary and elliptical but more and - and - that Ian made Kalen get off his ass and leave that place with him. Sera makes a quiet noise that Kalen can feel more than he can hear it.
"Well," and there is a low curl of irony serpentine around her voice. " - that's one point in his favor. So I'll say it like this, other than saving your life, he still seems like kind of a dick to me.
"You can't make him let down his walls, you know? If he doesn't wanna be vulnerable, which is such bullshit. We were made to be vulnerable.
"Love fucking hurts, sometimes. In every iteration."
Kalen HollidayKalen lets Sera hold him. He doesn't try not to relax against her, doesn't insist that he has to watch for monsters. This place is reasonably safe. There is a point beyond which that much fear seems ridiculous.
Beyond which living is more important than just not dying.
"Vulnerable...maybe. The separation between us is...an illusion. It seems like vulnerability I guess, when we let go of the illusion of distance. But it's not so much that we're at war and threatened as we're just a little lost. We're all creatures born of the same sacred breath. The same voice spoke the Words that formed us. That formed everything.
"However fucked up we might be, we're one perfect whole. Just...out of balance."
SerafíneOnce again, Kalen can feel more than he can hear the supple thread of her laughter. Which is more wry that it is humored, which is balanced beneath him. Her shoulders slide with it, and it is liquid in her, aware and alive and somehow at once lazy and intent.
She sort of hums in the background; thinks about what he's said the way she thinks about any of this fucking philosophy, which is to say: rather superficially and yet somehow: rather viscerally. Sera feels, she does not think, she does not care to think. She simply is, and she believes things, yes, on some level that is fundament that are not wholly dissimilar from the philosophy Kalen just offered her, but her belief in these things - this oneness - has little to do with Words or voices or first movers or perfect wholes. Hell, Sera probably believes a helluva lot more in imperfections than she does in perfections. The places where things change, where they fall apart, where you don't know what's coming next.
"Well," Sera says, incisive, "some parts of that perfect fucking whole are unbalanced enough that they still assholes.
"I wonder if there's a reason, though, that you keep falling in love with people who aren't available. Maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know? Keeps you on the outside, where you can stand guard.
"I don't know. I hate that psychoanalytic bullshit. But it's a thought."
Kalen Holliday[*dies* Thank you for that image, chat.]
Kalen HollidayKalen laughs, softly enough that Sera can feel it more than hear it. "I don't know what I would do in a perfect world. It seems boring, but I guess it would be less boring if I was also perfect? I don't know.
"We're a long way from that world. And yes, some parts of the whole we have are jerks. And monsters. But some of them are indescribably beautiful. A handful are all of those things.
"The world gets very complicated."
He considers a few seconds, and then says, "I think that the people I meet aren't really in a place for that on the whole. I tend to show up where I'm needed. Places I'm needed...they aren't very gentle. I don't have much time to just go looking for people who are more something or less of another thing. I don't even know what I'd do with them.
"I'm not really available anyway."
SerafíneThe noise she makes is a quiet hum, a supple thread of awareness that is live-wire in her body, that is somehow worked into the structure of her being - skin and blood and bone - as much subconscious as it is conscious.
Something that he says catches the wrong way on something deep inside her and Sera - she doesn't know what it is that is caught or where it has been captured, does not know why, does not know anything except that there is a moment where she is arrested, where she is between heartbeats, where she is suspended, you see. Abyssal as much as earthbound.
And then it passes.
Kalen can hear and perhaps feel the catch in her breath, and then it passes.
The dark things behind her are and will remain dark. But she thinks of them now, and kisses the crown of her head, and packs them carefully away.
And listens.
He tells her that he's not really available anyway. Quietly, Sera asks the only question she can ask him, after that, which is -
"Do you want to be?"
Available, she means.
Kalen Holliday"I don't know." He lets more of his weight rest against her. Lets his eyes close and stay closed.
He stays quiet for a few seconds, considering. "I never considered that kind of life an option. I had never really been in love when I joined the Order. The first sense of having a stable place to be, the first sense of being safe, the sense of having a family...the first I remember of any of that starts there. With Marcelus and Jenna.
"Marcellus...." He takes a careful breath. There is a barely perceptible shudder. "He's gone, in the explosion. With the others."
"Jenna and I got out. She's alive, but...she was never a twenty three-year-old girl from New Jersey. Some of what we were had to have been real, but even now I don't know which parts. I'm not sure I care. I still love her anyway.
"I didn't really think about settling down in a place like this. I knew chantries like ours existed, but I expected to be in Hermetic chantries. Not because I didn't like other Mages, but because I did. The Order...well...there were a few very vocal opponents to my joining the Order. Marcellus...." He laughs, more warmth than amusement. "Marcellus was just not someone you could argue with.
"Being available would be...at the very least bending the vows I made. And I know that people change Houses they back down. But I don't know how. Everything I see, everything do...it's never enough now. I don't know how I could live with doing less. And to be really available for another person...I couldn't always put all of that first."
SerafíneSera soothes his shudders away and when she does so she does so both thoughtlessly and physically. A thumb against his temple, perhaps. The pressure of her chin against the crown of his head. The suggestion - without pressure - of her mouth against the tangle of his pale hair.
He tells her that he never thought about settling down and Sera huffs a huff that is without context. Sera does not now think of settling down. She doesn't settle. Even though she is here and this is home and in spite of so many other things she does not feel settled. Even when she is quiet she is wrapped in movement, or the promise of it. Some forward-motion - that sense about her of doorways and thresholds, not just the places, but the places-between.
--
"What vows are those?"
Kalen Holliday"There are rather a lot of them."
Kalen takes a slow, soft breath. "The relevant ones here involve remaining in place where I belong, between people and monsters. And, however difficult it may be to believe, I am gentler in that interpretation than most of the others. Hell, I wanted Lucia Montanari from that thing. Even if we killed her after, and we may have, dying in the hold of a thing like that....
"Don't get me wrong. She threatened people I loved. She was trying to fight the Order. I was furious with her. I wanted to tear her apart. But we failed her father, we destroyed her family. Those things don't pardon what she did or what she formed pacts with, but she was hurt and she was angry. She deserved better than being shot like a rabid dog. By that time, there was only so much choice but there was so much time when saving her was a real option. No one ever took it, and when I tried...there nothing left I could do. And by then, she was trying to drag a powerful Umbrood spirit that fed on madness and horror across the Gauntlet. I couldn't just walk away from that."
Serafíne"I think that's bullshit," Sera says, quietly, even mildly, although there is beneath that softness a sort of vehemence that is bodily, is visceral, is intense. He can hear it in her voice. Feel it in the whipcord tensions of her body as she holds him, in the way her arms tighten around his torso. "You're not just some fucking shield, you're a man.
"And you've got a right to be alone and you've got a right to fall in love with assholes who are all wrong for you and you've got a right to refuse to fall in love with them and you've got a right to want to fall in love and you've got a right to decide that it's all too much bullshit right now and you're just going to have as much goddamned sex as you wanna have with anyone you wanna fuck and you've got a right to get it wrong and a right to get it right and a right to stumble through all of this bullshit right along with the rest of us.
"You've got a right to yearn and a right to need and a right to dream and you sure as hell have a right to cry when maybe you've got it wrong and you've got a right to get it wrong because every fucking person in the goddamned world gets it wrong every day and sometimes even in the middle of all of that bullshit they're getting it right.
"And you've got a right to get it right too. And someday you will. Or you won't, or you'll get it right and then you'll get it wrong and then it'll be wrong-right or right-wrong or fucking everything, all it once. That's fucking okay too.
"Which means, I still think Ian's kind of a jerk, even if he saved your goddamned life in an alternate reality. And I think it's okay that you fell in love with an Idea-of-Ian that Wasn't-Really-Ian because you don't know Anything-about-Ian and I think it's even better that you figured all of that out and I think it's still okay to be sad after all of that work because goddamned, you wanna be in love.
"And I don't think you have to go looking for anything. I just think that you shouldn't close yourself off like this because of some goddamned vow. Sometimes you just open your eyes, and there it is. There are a million fucking ways it can be.
"But that's just what I think."
Kalen HollidayKalen laughs at that, and there is nothing mocking or dark about it.
"Serafine." He says her name like it some wondrous, sacred thing. "If I loved you less I would kiss you for that."
SerafíneShe does kiss him.
The crown of his head, the warmth of her mouth.
It feels like a blessing, because it is.
--
There's quiet, after.
--
She could take him to bed. She would take him to bed if he were someone else. Dan or Dee, finding their way back through the muddle of desire and danger and wish fulfillment and infatuation and maybe-sort-of something-like-love and something-like-heartbreak. If his love for her in that moment felt more profane, perhaps, and less sacred.
Less, let us call it, Platonic, with a capital P.
If she thought it would help him to lose himself in her. In her body, in her skin. If he had turned to her and kissed her, or perhaps - even - if he had wanted to, in a way that she could feel.
If there were not this strange thing in her chest sometimes, when she thinks of -
--
Time passes. Time has passed.
She is so very tired and is starting to - well, drift. Sera breathes in sharply. Exhales and kisses the crown of his head again.
"Do you still have nightmares?"
Kalen HollidayHe smiles a little when she presses a kiss to the crown of his head.
It would not be so terrible a thing to be lost in her. There was a second, before he remembered who he was, when he almost did kiss her. Imperfect and blazing and brilliant in all the ways that only a world like they have, sharp-edged and uncertain can offer. Kalen was not meant for a perfect world any more than Sera.
He is most awestruck by the things that burn him and the things which threaten to swallow him whole. He stared at the end of the world with more amazement than fear. Because life is some searing, holy, precious thing. Incandescent. Transcendent. And then ashes.
And then, a few breaths or a few centuries or a few worlds later, a phoenix. Searing. Holy. Precious.
He does not speak of any of those things, he just lets the opalescent weight of them slip out from under his skin and drift into her. Some things are not meant to be framed with sound. They are framed by light and the space between heartbeats and by the way he reaches out to let the tips of his fingers trace a strand of Sera's hair.
"Yes," he says quietly in answer to her question.
Serafíne"I'm sorry for that."
For the nightmares and their persistence and whatever engendered them and what he suffers everynight and perhaps what he thinks he must suffer and all the rest of it. The interrupted sleep. The lack of peace. The sorrow revisited, and she is sorry for all of that and aware in some way that is - oh, liminal, right? between-and-becoming - of exactly where and whom and what they are.
Sera kisses him again, and it is quiet and it is thoughtful and it is not carnal. Her mouth in his hair, some apology embedded in the shape of it.
"Show me where you sleep. I'll give you some peace from them tonight."
Kalen HollidayKalen smiles a little. "I'm not sorry," he says softly. "Before I had them, I didn't know how to love anything enough that it could hurt to lose it. I'd been scared and I'd been outmatched, but I had never really been vulnerable. It's fucking haunting, but it's also beautiful in in the right light. I should learn to let go, but...at least I have things to let go of.
"I may have slept better before that, but I was never happy then."
He takes a breath when she kisses him again, like he can breathe in the warmth and the memory and somehow let it filter into his blood with oxygen. "I sleep in all kinds of places. Almost never in bed. Here is fine."
SerafíneMind 3. Calling it coincidental. -1 Specialty focus. -1 taking her time.
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (4, 4, 7) ( success x 3 )
SerafíneExtending, difficulty +1
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 7, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Serafíne(Also: can sing?)
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 6, 6, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 5 )
SerafíneThat makes Serafíne smile in a strange, sad way. She was named for the goddamned angels, wasn't she? But it isn't the name she was born with.
Still and strange and thoughtful the smile for all that she is not-precisely-drunk but tipsy and a little bit, lingeringly high and an awful lot exhausted, suffused in that dislocation that attends any long distance travel. The astonishment that naturally accompanies the return to the place-where-you-were, wherein you find that people have been living their lives without you.
The whole world is so goddamned huge and the Eiffel Tower and Red Rocks and Mount Everest and everyone in and on and under and around them all exactly at the same goddamned time whether you're looking at them or not, wherever you are.
--
What Sera does is: she sings.
And her voice should be a bit rusty, a bit stained with smoke and exhausted, shadowed by them and maybe the first bar or two are just like that but she must clear her throat or maybe her throat is always clear because she is quiet, because she is a choir, because wasn't she made to be one of the host of the Seraphim, doesn't she burn?
(No and no and no, and isn't that all bullshit, after all.)
--
She sings. The song is quiet and strange and worldless and is shaped by Kalen's confession that he welcomes the nightmares because he wasn't happy before that, because the nightmares are about what he can and has and will lose, and how much that hurts, and pain is preferable to so many things, isn't it: indifference, absence, silence.
The song is quiet and strange and worldless but it takes a shape soon enough beyond the shadow of his own thoughts and the shape is a shape her voice has worn before for him.
Sera does not give him a dream. She sings a song and she gives him the space for it. Her voice is a shield against the nightmares that come for him every night and the hollowed-out space, the vault of the sky and the ground underfoot, wherein he can dream without pain and without fear.
Kalen HollidayKalen lets himself float on her voice and then sink into it. It is as close as he gets to slipping back into oceans.
Sera sings a space into being and holds it there. Open.
She's sung him to sleep before. She's held space before too, though that was her presence. And Ian's. But Kalen had still taken that space and tried to let minnows nibble at the tips of his fingers.
This is new and the same and it is peaceful and it is like what he thinks oceans must be like if you do not fear them. Rising and falling and full of currents and deep enough for drowning or for gold gleaming in sunken ships or for mermaids.
And so he sleeps. Peaceful and without nightmares or murmurings or new horrors. Not even familiar horrors.
Just dreams in lilac and silver shades. Shimmering like dew on soft grass at dawn.
And maybe, though he does not breathe a word of this, though he breathes the awareness of the thoughts in as he breathes in the scent and the warmth of her and the richness of her notes as they color the air around them, maybe this is their perfect world after all. Searing. Holy. Precious. Incandescent.
Transcendent.
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