Late late late late late Friday night into Saturday morning, god knows the hour but the bars are long-since closed and the sun has not yet given much consideration to rising and the city is quiet as it is in those hours and a text shows up on Hawksley's phone.
Maybe he won't see it until the 'morrow.
you awake?
HawksleyIn coming days or weeks, whenever the whim happens to strike him at sunset in the library, Hawksley is going to be out of the country. He is going to turn to the apprentice using one of his altars and reading one of his books and ask her if she wants to go to England.
That hasn't happened yet. Perhaps it has already occurred to him, though. Hawksley's spontaneity is only genuine about half the time.
--
When Sera's text hits his phone, Hawksley is not asleep. Nor is he at home. He is somewhere else, and the bow tie on his tux is undone and so is his belt and he is not alone and there are other things happening. But he looks at his phone anyway, like a dick, and his mouth quirks in a lopsided, lazy smile. He is drunk and he is relaxed and
yeah
he texts back: he is awake.
SerafíneShe is, by contrast, entirely alone. And quiet, in a quiet room, with a blanket wound around her hips and a mug of cooling tea on a chipped, worn, stained coffee table. There is a bottle of whiskey on the floor by the arm of the couch, but for all that she is not drunk. Not the way he is drunk, and she is not loose, not the way he is loose, and she is not pleasured, not the way he is pleasured -
but for all that a smile, when his response comes through. Lopsided like his yeah but not lazy. Some other inflection. Some other infection.
He doesn't know that, though.
Just like: she doesn't know where he is, or how he is. Just that he is,
yeah,
awake now. Awake still.
Awake.
can i come over?
she asks, without context. Just text.
HawksleySitting alone with a cup of tea and a blanket over her legs is hardly the image anyone, ever has of Serafine whatshername. It is an image that exists, though, even with the bottle of whiskey nearby.
Sitting not-alone with someone bent over his lap and his tie undone and his mouth tasting of vodka is exactly the image most people might have of Hawksley's extracurriculars. Then again, most people don't know that Hawksley has curriculars to begin with. Most people don't know Hawksley at all.
All he says is yeah and what she says back is a request.
And that's really what gets his attention, when he picks up his phone again and looks through half-lidded eyes at what she says. It sends a thread of anxiety through his spine: wouldn't she just show up, wouldn't she just call him out to meet him at X, wouldn't this person with whom he has traded at least a piece of his name just create the reality she wants, rather than asking for it?
There is no answer on Sera's phone for a little while. When it comes, minutes later, it says:
not home. i'll come to you. where?
SerafíneSera is trying very hard not to think. No, wait, that's wrong. She is trying very hard not to feel, which is a very difficult thing to do in an otherwise empty room in a dark and silent house when you are awake and everyone else in the world is: elsewhere. But there she is, taking a pull from her whiskey bottle, reading old messages. Everything, whatever.
Pan's. she returns, not long after. the rectory?? ill be out front.
--
Which is where she'll be, however much later. Her shoes off and tucked neatly beside her on the front stoop, her arms wrapped around her thighs, and she's not wearing pants but who the hell needs pants when the shirt-tail of the men's button-down you are wearing as a dress and have been all day more-or-less covers your ass. Opaque stockings, thigh-high and trimmed in vintage lace buttoned neatly to the thin straps of her garters and a somewhat oversized baby-blue sweatshirt finish off the look and she is resting her chin on her knees and smoking a cigarette and drinking now and then from her bottle of whiskey, as she is wont to do, exhaling the smoke and looking up at the dark stippling of sky visible from her perch on the porch of the priest who loves her the way a father loves a daughter, whom she loves the way she loves everything: which is to say, the way fire loves oxygen.
Loose-haired, loose-jointed, loose-jawed, somehow. Resonance strong enough tonight that it feels like it is bleeding into the air around her. Visceral - first and foremost tonight. Wrenching, gut-wrenching, for all she looks so composed, like some scene from a John Hughes movie. The preacher's errant daughter sneaking out for a well-past-midnight rendenvous.
HawksleyThere is the matter of dismissing the person he rudely interrupted not so long ago. There's the matter of apologies, of insistence, of a rather harshly snapped set of words that catches that poor person well off their guard. There's Collins, doing as Collins does, taking over, smoothing over.
It turns out Hawksley has no fucking clue where Pan's rectory is, what the hell is Sera talking about. He knows what a fucking rectory is. He knows very little about Pan other than that he was a rather luminous, shining figure that Hawksley met maybe once. Sera draped herself all over him. Sera draped herself all over everyone; Sera draping herself over someone is no signal of particular affection.
There is an exchange, perhaps less terse than well where the fuck is that? but perhaps exactly that terse.
And however much later, there is a gleaming car the color of gold-flecked coffee sliding in front of Pan's rectory. And there is a window rolling down, and a beautiful young man with hair askew and wearing a half-undone tux looking out at her.
He is not a priest.
He does not love Sera the way a father loves a daughter. One could surmise, at least from how he speaks and sometimes how he behaves, that he does not love her at all. That he loves nothing, really, the way he loves knowledge, and power.
That he has loved nothing since the one he did admit -- to Sera, some time ago -- that he loved with all his heart.
But she loves him. God knows how. Maybe even knows why.
--
Hawksley cocks his head towards the passenger seat. "Get in, loser, we're going shopping."
SerafíneListen to him. Probably even God doesn't know how, or why.
Which may be okay with her. Sera's never much liked God anyway.
And yet, here she is on the porch of a shabby little clapboard two-story where the front door is always unlocked, on a shabby sort of street full of dingy rental housing and third-rate retailers that would be a dangerous street were it not for the inhabitant of that shabby little clapboard house behind her. Across from the darkened bulk of a silent church old enough that it has the full complement of a belltower and dingy stained glass windows, all surrounded by weedy apron of asphalt. A basketball court. A small playground for the daycare. Signage more in Spanish than English, and so damned ordinary, the whole scene, except for her, him, them.
His goddamned Porsche.
--
Sera is feeling him from some distance. All that sundrenched and soaring and Pan's fucking illumination at her back which makes it seem like high fucking noon and strange to feel all that light, rising right, when inside she's just -
- no, wait. Not strange at all. Someone she is always shredding herself open. Somehow she is always whole.
Like now, swaying to her feet as he pulls up to the curb, unsteady in that way that seems deliberate, picking up her bottle with her right hand, scooping up her shoes with the left, padding down the walk in her stockinged feet. And she wants to reach out and slide her hand through his disordered hair but her hands are full and she wants to bend down and kiss him but her heart is full of this kind of worming darkness, the sort that burrows more than it breaches the surface, and she isn't really sure she could do either of these things without staining him, somehow.
One desire trumps the other. She doesn't reach for him, doesn't bend to kiss him, just smirks, this native bravado, when he calls her loser, and circles the car, and sinks or maybe pours herself into the passenger's seat. Drops her shoes onto the floor and settles the bottle between her knees and tips her head back, long hair sliding down her spine. Vivid in the darkness.
Stark, visceral.
"What. You don't like my fucking outfit?" Slanting gaze fixed on his profile, hunting-sharp in the swimming half-light thrown back from the dash. Takes in his undone tux and shows off a bit of leg. Well, given the length of her clothing, more than a bit of leg and breathes in, and breathes out, and -
"Little late, isn't it? There's no place open."
HawksleySera likes one god very much. Of the sky, of the sun. Not entirely human but far from entirely avian. With that god or version-of-a-god before her and all the might of Pan's god behind her she must feel surrounded by light, all of it suffusing and blanketing and buffeting
that coil of terrible darkness she took into herself earlier.
When he lowers his window and she sways over, anyone who might be up or peering out a window at this hour would think whore and think john. Neither of them belong here. Hawksley, for all the languages he speaks, knows only a basic smattering of Spanish -- enough to survive for a few hours in Mexico if he really had to, and perhaps has had to. No more. The Porsche doesn't belong here and his tux doesn't and she doesn't but at least some people know she knows the priest.
Think she's a whore, perhaps, all the same.
The passenger door is opened from within for her, so she doesn't have to lower shoes nor bottle to grasp the handle. She doesn't buckle in and Hawksley doesn't go tearing off; he can't heal her. He doesn't think she can heal herself from decapitation if someone were to throw their SUV into the side of his little sportscar.
"I usually don't even notice what you're wearing, tell the truth," Hawksley informs her. "It was a joke." There's a beat. He looks at her inner thigh, then her face. "Put your seatbelt on and we'll drive around. Tell me what's up."
SerafíneIt's a joke he tells her and "Oh," she says. Oh. Quietly, you understand, though not - never retiringly, and there's a note of surprise in there, still the quiet sort of surprise, this hanging sense of it, like the leading edge of disappointment. The moment he said that they were going shopping she believed him and - moreover - wanted to go shopping at three a.m. with a sky god in a half-undone tux, anywhere, everywhere, where the fuck ever, something strange and absurd and surreal.
Something lovely.
Something - anything - beyond the boundaries of her mind and her body.
"I spend so much time on what I wear. How is it that you don't notice? Sometimes my shoes are so fucking sexy I figure they should be on the table instead of under it and almost want to take them off and put them on my plate instead of the meal."
She breathes out and it is half a breath and half a laugh and there's no mirth to it. Reaches for the seatbelt because he told her too and pulls it across her body. Snaps it home. Have they moved yet? She doesn't know.
Her hands are shaking. Suddenly she doesn't know what to do with them. Or even why they are attached to her damned arms.
"I killed someone tonight."
HawksleyThere's a mental note being made to deposit Sera in the cinema in his home -- perhaps she stumbled across it on her own one day, and knows of its existence, or perhaps she'll be as delighted and surprised as anyone else who didn't think to look behind that particular door -- and have her watch Mean Girls until it is as firmly ensconced in her mind as his own. Don't ask Hawksley why he likes Mean Girls. Don't ask him why he got so pissed off at that Frick prick at Adam's bookshop. Don't ask him why he and Kate, Katie, Katherine, Kat, his ex-wife, broke up. This is how things are now. This is who he is. He has a mansion with a movie theater in it. Go with the flow.
Hawksley is driving as soon as she is securely fastened in. He's not a maniac, even now. He's not driving like one, either, though he does like to drive fast, especially when he gets on a long dark stretch of road and when it curls into his thoughts that he can probably get away with almost anything if he puts his mind to it.
Dangerous thoughts, those. He dismisses them, brushes them aside like so much dust from a book discovered in a dying man's forgotten library, and listens. He shrugs. "I don't see why shoes being sexy would make them appetizing enough to serve for dinner," he informs her. "I don't notice much what you wear because I'm noticing you instead." A glance, to the side, at her. "Would've thought you knew that."
Eyes forward, driving, driving, not noticing her hands shaking in the dark. Even Hawksley has limits.
I killed someone tonight.
Hawksley is very quiet. For several seconds. He is still driving: fast, controlled, lazy in this paradoxical way.
"Are you being metaphorical?"
He would not put it past her.
SerafíneSome other night she might come back with a riposte about sexy shoes or anything being good enough to eat (or at least display on the table) and some other night she might go still when he tells her that he doesn't notice what she's wearing because he is instead noticing her. Might smile, a kind of half-smile that hints at something deeper and something stranger and something anchored and something aware: because she does know that. And the knowing-of-that makes her aware-of-him in ways that she is aware of few others.
Not tonight.
They're driving. He makes a turn and then another and finds a road that is empty enough and long enough and dark enough and straight enough that he can go as fast as he likes. Perhaps he doesn't need any of the caveats. Perhaps he just goes as fast as he likes.
The city gleams by, an impressionist blur. Radiant lines of light streaking through not-quite-darkness.
She tucks her hands beneath her thighs. Thinks that is a good place to keep them, then changes her mind and draws her knees up instead, heels on the edge of the seat, arms wrapped 'round. Whiskey bottle dangling from her hands which are: still shaking. But not as much, and it's easier to pass this off as vibration from the road.
--
Those several quiet seconds: she is breathless, gaze shunted away, mouth on bony knob of her right knee, watching the white line at the street's edge.
Is she being metaphorical?
"No."
--
A beat. Two. Three. Four.
There is a rhythm to the universe. A pulse, invisible, that punches through skin, through the base of the skull, seizes itself in the basal ganglia or what the fuck ever. She doesn't know. She's listening to it and it is: beating. Or maybe that's her heart.
"He was Fallen. I didn't even know he was Awake. I looked into his mind. He had some kind of shield or effect, but it wasn't meant to keep someone like me out.
"It was meant to pull me in.
"I don't remember - ever - feeling anything that horrible. Filthy." (Of course, there are things she does not remember.) "I used that. And I killed him."
Her voice is choked, thready. But she hasn't started to weep, not yet.
HawksleyHe is a selfish, self-absorbed, self-involved, self-seeking young man. He is concerned with a singular higher ideal that is, in the end, about no one but himself. It advances no one but himself. Had Hawksley been alive during the Ascension War he would have simply fucking abstained, being disinterested entirely in the Ascension of the human race. There's more than one reason why he was dismissed from the Order; no code, no law, no oath would restrain him from what he wants for himself. He's a bastard.
He does take particular notice of a few things outside of his main pursuit. He does care here and there, he does concern himself with a few things beyond his own power. There is, for example, his trust in Collins. There is, for a more immediately present example, his attention to Serafine.
Of course he doesn't care, or even notice most of the time, what she does or doesn't wear. Only as much as it titillates him, perhaps, or gets in his way, or amuses him, or gives him something witty to say at her expense. But he does always notice her. Even when she is drinking alcoholic slushies and he is jumping rope in the park; he is aware of her. She knows that. After all, she is aware of him, too.
--
She is not being metaphorical.
The road is long and dark and, after a while, lit almost entirely by his headlights alone.
Hawksley says nothing, and keeps his eyes forward.
--
Someone who knows more about empathy, psychology, or compassion would not ask what Hawksley does, after she explains to him what happened.
He's not one of those people though.
"How exactly did you do it?" he asks, and perhaps it isn't mere curiosity but it sure sounds like it.
SerafíneSera does not answer him immediately. She drags in a breath, harsh. Another one.
She watches the road as it passes by. As it slides sinuous from the sharp beam of his headlights to darkness behind. She takes a sip from her whiskey bottle, which she holds more out of habit than intention. More to make sure that she has something in her stomach when the urge to throw up overwhelms her.
It hasn't come in a while, but she knows it will return.
"I don't - "
This sharp shake before she resettles her head, mouth open, teeth set against her skin.
"Life." Quiet. "And Prime?" The query is as much for herself as for him. The moment was plosive and surreal and wrenching and she can hardly remember what it was that she did, because she did not do it with her mind, but with her body and her soul. "I attacked his pattern. His consciousness. I wanted to knock him out.
"And I did. And he fell in the water and he drowned."
She's crying now, silently, head turned away from him.
His eyes on the road.
"I don't really know what was happening. Half the time I thought I was hallucinating. But I wasn't."
SerafíneA beat, some downstroke. The first of a full measure.
Then - in a smaller voice, just a bit choked, she adds,
"Don't stop driving, okay?"
HawksleyLegally there should not be an open container of alcohol in the front seat. Legally Hawksley should not be going as fast as he is.
Logically he should not be asking the woman he knows to be more than a little tender-hearted how, precisely, she killed a man so recently. Perhaps this night. Could have been years ago. Hawksley has not tried to place it in time. He does, however, want to know the magic she used. She used Life to rend his body, Prime to twist his soul. And even then, she confesses, she only meant to knock him out.
At which she was successful.
--
Hawksley, being as he is, huffs a breath outward when she says he drowned. He is not mocking her tears, as much as he is uncomfortable with them. He drives, and she sniffs and asks him not to stop driving, and his brows furrow. He does not say anything for a while, until:
"You didn't kill him, Sera. The water killed him. As the water has a right to."
Whatever that means, Hawksley does not pause to explain to her. He glances at her. "You took from him the ability to deny the water its due, among other things. What do you think he would have done to you, and whomever was with you? What was he trying to do to you when you reached into his mind to begin with?" Hawksley is frowning, ever deeper. "He was Fallen, Sera. They aren't even human anymore. You're lucky you could recognize what was left of him as a mind to begin with, as a soul. You're lucky you even survived it."
His frown has only furrowed. Rather out of nowhere, or everywhere, he slams his hand against the wheel.
"What the fuck, Sera? What the fucking.... fuck!"
That last one isn't a question. And regardless of what she just asked him, he somewhat forcefully flashes lights, pulls to the shoulder, stops the car. It takes him a moment, sitting there gripping the wheel and staring forward, before he remembers to turn on his flashers. Before he puts the emergency break on. Before he can unwind his fingers from the steering wheel and look at her.
A beat, then two, pass. And then his belt is off and he is all but kicking the driver's side door open, getting out, slamming it behind him. Outside the car he paces a moment. One way. Another, each direction aborted. Stops, because there's really no place to go, and then stops beside his door, turning his back on it, leaning against the porsche. She can't see this part, but he presses the heels of his hands to his brow, fuming.
The car is still on, and at least for a while, it dings about the driver's side seatbelt. That sound fades, soon enough.
SerafíneSera cries very quietly in the passenger's seat of Hawksley's Porsche. It comes and goes. Her tears are not harsh or stormy, just present, leaking from the corners of her eyes and funneling down her cheeks. Sometimes she takes a breath that gets all interrupted, right, some huff-huff-huff that is entirely unintentional, these little spasms of her diaphragm. And she sits there, curled up, arms around her legs, teeth set into her kneecap, then just her mouth, then instead her cheekbone, sounding really rather almost-normal until (huff huff huff) another one of those little spasms digs into her body or she sniffs because, you know, her nose gets a bit snotty when she cries. Isn't it that way for everyone?
They drive.
She finds that oddly soothing, because you see right now she cannot really bear to be still and she's a bit too tired and spent to move. So: driving, hurtling through the dark, his hand between them when he has to reach to change gears. The engine's ordered chaos, its quietly controlled crescendos and decrescendos as he accelerates on the flats and slows just enough to take the curves with flippant grace.
The silence lasts long enough that when he starts to speak again she is almost grateful. Steals this glance at him - her stark eyes, her sharp little profile and the three a.m. tangle of her hair like a halo, glowing in the dashboard lights. And he tells her that she didn't kill him, and she opens her mouth (again around her knee) to maybe say something but Hawksley does not pause. She can see the frame of another purposeful breath in the air all around him and he goes on and she returns that glance briefly, then drops her gaze to the shadows where her stupid shoes are rattling around on the floormats and she is sort-of nodding, the motion arrested because her mouth is open again, because her teeth are once more set in her skin, and it could be assent or acknowledgment or agreement or apology, right? Maybe all four, wrapped up into one.
I know. I know. I know. this litany punctuate at the end of each damn question. What on earth would he have done to her. What was he trying to do to them. She is lucky she even survived it. Yes, she knows that too.
Then his hand slams against the wheel and she just kind of draws this arrested breath and she's in his periphery so he probably can't see her bracing her shoulders for whatever is to come, but she does, this thoughtless tension in her spine and he's steering the little sports car onto the shoulder, Jesus Christ where the hell are they, even? The headlights forward, bright down the shoulder. The flashers tick-tocking when he remembers to shove them on.
Then he storms out of the Porsche and she starts crying again, this time in earnest near-silence, her head down, her arms so tightly wrapped around her legs that her knuckles go white with the strain. Cries - as she does so many things - without reservation.
Cries until she starts hiccoughing like mad. Cries - honestly - until she pukes.
Which she does, cracking open the passenger's door, leaning out over the verge while her body rids itself of the whiskey she ingested. She doesn't really stop crying while she's throwing up. Somehow they have the same rhythm, don't they?
Sera pulls the car door closed again when she is sure the spell has passed. Not a slam: just enough force for it to click home.
She's calmer, after. Wipes the sourness off her mouth with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Wipes her nose. Then peels the sweatshirt off because you know, it's gross now. She just used it as a big dumb hanky.
HawksleyThere's a damn good reason that Hawksley is out of that car as quickly as he is. It's certainly not that his rage is threatening to overtake him, certainly not that he's about to start smacking Sera in the face. He's angry, but he isn't violent. And it isn't that he wants to cool night air to clear his head and calm him down, though he knows that helps, he's seeking it without even realizing it, wanting the wind on his face because it makes him feel more whole. The real reason, when you get down to it, is that Sera is crying and Hawksley has been as expertly trained as any young man in the western world -- perhaps the world, full stop. He can't bear it. He couldn't bear it when Alicia started crying after his workout, he couldn't bear it when he broke up with his first girlfriend, and he couldn't bear it any of the times he's seen his mother weep. He would rather Sera do what his first boyfriend did when they broke up and just bloody his fucking nose already.
Outside the Porsche he puts his hands in his hair while he works on wrapping his mind around what Sera has told him. He feels like a Sleeper. He knows next to nothing about Mind magic. He does know that, as with many spheres, the ability to act upon another pattern comes only with rather significant power, but prior to that, one can enact small changes. But one can almost always chart a path or create a shield early, early on. They teach apprentices that. He knows that plenty of magi who can reach into your thoughts can also fucking block off their own mind.
And this is why he is so angry that he is out of the car, so that he does not get in Sera's face and just scream at her. And this is why he is waiting for the wind on his face to ease him. And this is why he is out of the car, on the driver's side, when he hears the other door open. Hawksley looks sharply past his right shoulder, listening more than looking, wondering if she's getting out.
Nope.
She's throwing up.
Hawksley exhales heavily and circles the car, arms unfolded, grasping the edge of his car door and reaching over, taking her hair on either side of her head and drawing it upward. He's had way too much practice at this. He does it by the light of the moon and the car interior, holding it all back while Sera sobs and Sera vomits. He's not the sort to feel a lurch of his own in the presence of puke; he just notices that it's mostly liquid. So he's there, and pulling the door closed is only going to close it on his arm, so that doesn't happen. She folds herself back in, and he comes around, avoiding the puddle, while she pulls off her sweatshirt and wipes at her face.
Good friends give you mouthwash or a real hanky or something. Rub your back. Hawksley at least looks sympathetic when he says:
"You'd better not be crying because I'm angry, Sera."
Looks sympathetic. Sounds like he's making a request.
SerafíneShe doesn't expect him to come 'round the Porsche and she doesn't expect him after to stay but there's not much room for expectations inside her, just that flood of emotion, so some piece of her startled when gathers up her hair and that part of her very much wants to get hold of herself but the rest of her does not pause for much of anything.
The purging helps, though. With everything, and afterwards she feels both shaky and clarified and not at all like she needs to cry except in the seconds between the seconds where other seconds live and she's looking up at him, strangely abashed, when her golden head emerges from beneath the bulk of the sweatshirt as she shrugs it off, and she cannot quite meet his eyes except sometimes, when it feels so direct as to be startling, and talking about why she's crying just makes Sera - quite suddenly - want to cry again and he can see her tearing again but he can also see her bracing her shoulders and willing herself not to cry, and the effort that requires for her.
Sera shakes her head no. No, she's not crying because he's angry but she's not looking at him because she doesn't really know if it is true and doesn't know if he wants the truth or if that was just a please and doesn't know an awful lot of things right now, foremost of them is: whether she will ever feel clean again.
So: thinking thinking thinking, which is hard when everything inside you is wrong and bad and gross, but thinking and then she looks up at him, just kind of steals this glance and takes a deep deep breath and says very quietly, "Maybe a little bit. Not 'cos you're mad but because I made you mad. I'm sorry I won't - " breathbreathbreath " - cry anymore." Promising not to cry makes her want to cry but again she holds it back.
"You don't - you can just drop me off at home, okay? I'm sorry."
[-1 WP to not cry!]
HawksleyThat request was, in all sincerity, both a please stop crying, since he cannot handle it, but it was also a plea for his anger -- of all things -- to not be the thing that makes her weep so hard she pukes. That anger, given what she's told him, should be little more than a footnote.
The air outside is cool. This time of year, the sun sets and heat vanishes from the city and its outskirts. Perhaps it feels comforting on her face and her throat, perhaps it soothes. Perhaps it just tightens, chills, makes the ache worse. Hawksley, in shirt and jacket and his own everpresent warmth, doesn't feel it.
She looks abashed, and teary, and determined, and it all just makes him feel more shitty.
--
Hawksley's brow furrows a little deeper. He listens, because she always tells him the truth when she doesn't try to skip over thinking at all, and shakes his head. His hand reaches out, stroking a palm over the top of her head.
"Don't be dumb," he says, softer, though verbally more a direct order than his expressed hope that he wasn't the reason she was bawling. There's tenderness in those three words, murmured as they are. "I don't care if you cry, Sera." LIE. LIE. LIE. A neon sign appears in her magician's vision above his head, three arrows flashing as they point at his head, yelling LIE LIE LIE. It's okay, though. The truth is: he cares very much that she cries. Which is why he doesn't like it. Not one bit. Not at all.
"I just don't think me being mad or you making me mad is the thing worth crying over," he says, still quiet, still palming her head, stroking her thick bleached hair, scritching mildly at her scalp with his fingertips. He leans over, careful, and kisses her where her third eye should be, would be, is.
"Besides, I'm not even mad anymore."
Neon signs flash around his face again.
--
He doesn't tell her yes he'll take her home or stop saying sorry to me, jesus, what the fuck. He does help her fold back into the Porsche, and closes the door, and walks back around to the driver's side. Hawksley gets in. He looks over at her. There's no need to settle into those seats: they fold around him as close and supple as a lover. There's just the dome light fading off after the door closes, and his eyes maintaining some light even after they are back in darkness.
"I'm gonna take you to my place," he says quietly. "We'll wash up." He pauses a moment, thinking of what she's been through, how she looks right now. "You can be alone, if you want," he also says, just as quiet. "There's a million rooms." Or fifteen, minus the rooms Collins and Alicia and Hawksley sleep in. His eyebrows lift. "Maybe you can sweat it out, too. I've got the sauna and the steam room," which are different, of course. "Or swimming. Or we could dance or fence or sit outside. Or you can be alone," he says again, because he is not sure what she needs when the inside of her psyche is crawling with such filth. He is suddenly doubting that it was okay to touch her, earlier.
"Just don't cry because I'm angry," he asks her, again a plea more than an order. "Don't... apologize for crying, or for calling me. It just makes me think that you're not going to tell me what you really need right now."
SerafíneHawksley is right, later, when he is doubting whether it was okay to touch her. She didn't touch him when he pulled up in front of Pan's little house. Didn't kiss him. Didn't curl her hands through his hair. Didn't initiate any contact with him whatsoever and there was no conscious thought behind it, just this thread of a kind of dark, acquired certainty that she might be a carrier somehow. That she might spread this disease, whatever it is. That she might infect the people she touches, loves, admires, adores, with something that cannot be scrubbed away.
But she's too tired to flinch when reaches out and strokes the crown of her head or maybe she doesn't quite remember too and anyway she also needs that contact because, like most people in the goddamned world who fuck things up and live through loss and hurt themselves and the people they love and come back from those things, too, with new wisdom or new knowledge or new platitudes or new resentments or whatever gets them through, she's dumb sometimes.
He instructs her not to be, and does so with a quiet tenderness that makes her want to cry and he says that he doesn't care of she cries, which is a lie, and that he's not even angry anymore, which is also a lie, and both lies are so carefully and thoughtfully meant that now she looks teary and wretched and adoring rather than abashed and lifts her chin minutely when he bends to care-full-y kiss her over her third eye without even thinking about it. Closes her eyes as he comes close and kisses her brow, carefully, carefully.
And starts to cry again.
--
She's sorry, she's sorry, she doesn't tell him that she's sorry but she is and she can't stop him and what he may know or may not know, what he may sense or may not sense is that these tears are different, right. Clear, serous, not cloudy. Cleansing rather than infected, infectious.
Because he is so warm and so bright and so searing and so soaring and he burns so damned bright, the gesture and the kiss feel like a blessing from a sun-born, sun-burnt, sun-bright god and he comes away from without a trace of taint.
And by the time he has folded her back in to the Porsche and closed her door and circled the ar on that dark, deserted road, and sunk into the lover's embrace of his driver's seat she has dashed those last few leaking tears away and manages, you know, not to apologize to him again even though the urge is there, beneath her skin and kind of wraps itself around her spine, not urgent but present, because she's dumb, at least until he tells her what it does to him, when she says it.
Which does not excise the urge but gives her the space to understand why the fuck it isn't really okay (which explanation: also makes her want to cry)
"Drive the long way. Okay?"
A deep breath. She is telling him what he needs right now. Which is harder to do than most people know or understand.
"If I fall asleep in the car, let me sleep. Don't wake me up. Don't carry me in." He could, and she might never know it, she sleeps that deeply. "Just let me sleep. I'll come in when I wake up."
And she reaches out for his right hand with her left, which is also harder than most people can understand.
"And tell me why you're mad. Okay?"
HawksleyHawksley can't tell the difference between infected tears and cleansing tears. He really can't. What he can tell is that she isn't fighting the crying as much, doesn't look quite as lonely and miserable, and that changes his ability to tolerate it. He does kiss her, not knowing what sort of tears she's bringing, not realizing that she is terrified she will taint him with something, not knowing that when he straightens his back she can see that he is still fine. He is just as clean and just as bright and untouched and unassailable by the filth of this world as he was before he came near her.
So that must mean something, right?
--
There is this: a little shallow on empathy he may be, but Hawksley is more in tune with himself, on many levels, than a number of young men of his age and upbringing. He knows what he feels and he is so articulate, in so many languages, that it is little trouble for him to explain why he doesn't want her to be saying sorry, why he doesn't want her crying to be due to his frustration. Whether that means that her crying or saying sorry is or isn't okay, he doesn't hasten to judge. He just tells her the context:
when you X it makes me feel Y and I would like you to Z.
"Sure," he says, and puts on his seatbelt, and makes sure she has hers on, and he turns his eyes from her and starts to drive. As he starts to drive, she starts to speak. And what she asks for instantly makes him want to argue: that's totally dumb. She doesn't need to sleep in the car. But Hawksley doesn't argue. He just decides not to let her fall asleep in the first place. "Okay," he says, and it's not really a lie.
Her hand rests atop his, atop the gear shift. He opens his fingers so hers can rest between them. Her request makes his brow furrow. He thinks for a while, watching headlights on the dark roads.
"You should have shielded your mind before you tried to touch someone else's." There's a rising intensity, in the next few words, like he's forestalling argument: "I know you didn't know, okay? What he was. But that's all the more reason to protect yourself. Jesus. It's like us and condoms."
Saying that makes him think of fucking her. Vaguely, not even erotically, but it's there. "Which is also a little fucking stupid," he points out, not for the first or twentieth time. "But you know me. You trust me. But everyone else? Especially the people you don't know from Adam? You fucking protect yourself. So why the shit wouldn't you do that with your own mind?"
He breathes out through his nose. "That's why I'm angry. Because you're smarter than that, you're more powerful than that, you know better. There's a difference between experiencing life or trusting the universe or whatever and not having some self-preservation. And I'm just... pissed because it could have been a lot worse.
"And I don't care," he says, insistent, halfway, turning to glance at her for a second, "I don't care that there's one less fucking Fallen alive right now. I still don't think that Nephandus dying was even your fault, just a happy goddamn coincidence. Fucking karma, you know? But as bad as you feel now, it could have been so much worse. And thinking about that makes me want to... fucking throw up, I don't know."
His left hand grips the wheel, but he hasn't moved his right. He is staring ahead.
"So it fucking pisses me off."
SerafíneThe analogy is perfect. Bloody perfect, and he is ready for the argument that she didn't know and goes on and his voice rises and she says nothing, watching the road and the strangers' headlights hurtling toward them through the dark, then fading away in the rearview.
She listens and steals a glance at his profile and frowns a bit in a way that could easily be read as thoughtful rather than miserable except that she is miserable and that infects everything she does but he: has his hands on the wheel and his eyes where they belong on the road so he probably cannot see it and he cannot tell the difference between one kind of tears and another but he can read her body language, her presence in the space, and this time she seems wholly capable of bearing his anger. Of living beside it.
She doesn't break down into tears at all.
"I never - " a pause, a breath, she's looking for words and they are both limited and limiting, "thought about it like that, it makes perfect sense. You know? Like. I never even thought of it at all. A mindshield like safe sex."
This note of breathy humor that is not really humored, just a noise she makes,
"I can apologize for that right?" And she really is asking him, and she really does want to and thinks that this is a perfectly valid and reasonable request. A little while later, a little further down the road:
"Thank you for telling me."
HawksleyNow that's awesome. He came up with an analogy on the fly and it's totally perfect. He flicks his eyes over at her, noting the humor, or the pretense of it, and hoping.
"Apologize to yourself," he says, and it isn't mean to be as flippant or as dismissive as it sounds. Just a turning around, not a deflection but a reflection: ultimately that's what he thinks. "You're the one you owe it to."
Not him.
His fingers sqeeze hers on the gear shift. He exhales, more slowly. "Me getting mad is like you crying. It's just fucking coping with something completely fucked up."
SerafíneSera doesn't know what to do with it when Hawksley tells her to apologize to herself. It makes something else that has nothing to do with any of this catch inside her and she closes her eyes and feels it, strange and nameless and unsettled and knows she has to do something about it, perhaps as soon as she recovers from this.
I might cry a lot, you know?" Which, naturally, makes her want to cry and she kinda holds it in and it kinda shows in her eyes but he's kinda driving so Hawksley better have his eyes on the road.
She squeezes his hand back. You know, just a little, because she is still suck beside and within and around the conviction that she might taint him somehow. "For a little while. I know it's dumb but I feel like there's something wrong with me. Something tainted. Infected, or infectious, or something. And it scares me, and it feels like it's never going to go away.
"Even if it probably will."
Hawksley
That makes his brow furrow, deeply. He doesn't take his eyes off the road, turning as he is in the dark, but he shakes his head a little. "Feels are real but they aren't reality. Reality isn't even real. Will is reality. Even subconscious will. The more time and energy you give this feeling that there's something wrong with you, the more power it will have. You'll imbue it."
He does glance at her, so brief, as the road straightens on ahead. "I know this all just happened and you're just having feelings and you just said you know it'll probably go away, but... make sure it does. Exorcise it. It doesn't belong to you. It isn't of you. It was summoned," he doesn't point out that this is because she didn't ceremonially encircle herself with protection again, because she gets that, "and it left a mark. But it did not come from you and it is not part of you. It isn't a cancer. It isn't alive,"
like cancer is alive, devouring, demanding,
"and that feeling, or that mark, or that taint, isn't natural to you and won't become so." He pauses a moment, a stillness in that car as it moves so very, very fast. "Exorcise it. Ritually or however you do it. Do it in a way you believe in, but do it. Just ignoring it or pretending it's already gone won't do any more good than wallowing in it." Hawksley shakes his head. "Just do something that makes you feel clean. Even if that feeling only lasts a little while after the ritual. Then do it again. However much you need to. Imbue that with your time and attention and energy. Give that cleansing, whatever form it takes, your power. And it will be as real, and as strong, as the feeling you have now. Realer. Stronger."
SerafíneSera does not do ritual. She does: feelings. That's it, full stop. She doesn't even bother with yoga like Jim or what the fuck ever other strangers do, she just feels things and wills them and hey, we're done.
But she must know better than to argue about ritual with a Hermetic, so she doesn't, not really. Just listens to him with her hand over his as he grips the gearshift to change gears and his tendons are all flexing with the motion. Listens to the engine and the subtle thread of road noise and night outside and the hum of traffic somewhere close, around the curve, down the flats.
"It's not the same for me," she tells him, rather gently, though being so deliberately gentle with him makes her want to cry again and there it is.
"I kind of have to suffer through it. Feel it rise, and feel it ebb, and feel it leave. And I will probably cry alot, so I want you to be prepared.
Hawksley"I know," he says, interruptive, when she says it's not the same. He knows it isn't. They don't always speak the same language. Or rather: the same dialect.
There is a kneejerk reaction to what she says next that he doesn't voice. He just looks forward, driving. "Do what you need to do," he says eventually, quietly. And that is all.
--
Hawksley drives until they reach his house. It isn't downtown. It isn't in Aurora. It's in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the entire country. It's a house -- a mansion -- that is unreasonably large, unnecessarily large. God only knows why Hawksley has such a house, with all its rooms. Why he has so much that he can surely never enjoy entirely on his own. No one asks him. He doesn't feel the need to explain himself to anyone. It doesn't occur to him to consider how he appears to others; certainly not people who don't matter.
Which is most people.
He doesn't stop her, as he had sort of promised himself, if she falls asleep. He just drives inward, into the garage off to the side, til the engine cuts. Til the lights go out.
SerafíneHe doesn't say anything else. Neither does she.
Maybe she cries a little bit more which sucks but these are also a different sort of tears. Not cleansing, and not clarified, but not wretched, wracking sobs either. Sera can cry a thousand different ways. There are as many nuances to her tears at there are nuances to her kisses and she gives herself over to them all, so very easily.
The tears stop. Her breathing shifts. They are on: some street that is not quite his own, but is not far from it, when her hand goes slack on his and slips downward and her head lolls to the side until her shaved brow comes to rest on the passenger's window. Breath fogging the cool glass. It's good. It's better. She doesn't even need to attempt small magicks to soothe herself when her will is at its low ebb. She just needs to be there. The car moves. Moves her from place to place, takes them from here way back over to there and allows her to be many places at the same time, which is another kind of miracle.
The rhythm and the movement and the engine hum and her teary-eyed exhaustion and her ridiculous get-up and on and on conspire to lull her into that sleep that she might not otherwise have achieved tonight.
And she doesn't wake up when he turns onto his street, or pulls through his gate, or eases the Porsche into its garage. Doesn't wake when he kills the engine, or when the headlights fade.
This is what she wanted. To sleep, maybe even to dream, not surrounded by death.
And maybe - just maybe - he lets her.
HawksleyThere are tears. And lots of them. And Hawksley has gone so quiet, and is looking forward more than he looks at her, and he notices when her hand relaxes. He looks at her then, as she drifts off. He frowns, because the truth is: the glass is cold and the world outside is cold, too. It's autumn. It's nightfall. He sighs.
He reassures himself that he never promised her shit. Not to let her have whatever she wants, and not even to be there, caring for her, when she cries
and cries
and cries,
and lets something awful work its way through her like an illness she can't fight but can only get over. He makes her few promises. Come to think of it, he can't think of a single one he's made her off the top of his head. Not explicitly.
--
The car stops, and he looks at her, and then he gets out. He comes around to the passenger side and opens the door, and reaches in, unbuckling her. Perhaps she wakes. But he ends up lifting her, arm under her knees and around her, under her arms. She is not the heaviest weight he's lifted. He leaves her grotesque sweater where it is and bumps the door closed with his heel.
She is going to be taken inside. And taken to some room, it hardly matters what room, because it is not his but not far from his. Some dark room with a bed that is unmade and only a little furniture that is dustcovered, including a settee that is softer than it needs to be. Hawksley will set her down, in this cool but not cold room, dark and mostly empty but clean. On a settee that is softer than it needs to be. With his tuxedo jacket laid over her.
With Collins, summoned in the dead of night to get the sweater and have it cleaned, set out toiletries in the adjoining bathroom for Miss Sera, and arrange breakfast for her the following morning.
It is Collins who does these things. Collins who brings a real blanket to Sera, without removing Hawksley's jacket. Collins who puts a small wastebin near the settee, a small table with a bottle of water. Collins who ensures, since Hawksley forgot, that the vents in the room will let warm air in.
Hawksley leaves her alone, then. to sleep. To cry. To vomit. Whatever it is she needs. He is relatively convinced that what she needs is not necessarily him.
No comments:
Post a Comment