Kiara and her fern and her library are leaving The Pec, walking that narrow - narrowing - gauntlet between the booths and the bar, which is now more of an obstacle course as the place starts to fill up, as the derby dolls come and go, shift tables, toss stories back and forth and somehow Sera has made it from the ladies' room back to the bar and is leaning against a barstool engaged in an animated conversation with a short, pugnacious looking girl with a cauliflower ear that she interrupts pretty abruptly when Kiara walks by.
"Hey! We're going back to my place, after. Have a little party, or at least light a fire in the chiminea and get high. You're welcome to catch a ride with us or drop by, later. 719 Corona Street, in Cap Hill. The door's almost always open."
KiaraKiara and her fern are departing, the brunette offering a bright apology as the fronds of her plant tickle the necks of several bar-goers as she navigates her way through. Sera captures her attention as the crowds part near the door to let her through, she can feel the crisp air outside as the door closes on a couple of departing bar hoppers. Kiara's flushed, several shots of Tequila coupled with beer will do that for you. The color in her cheeks highlights the red of her lipstick. Her mouth curving in a surprised, if appreciative expression at the invitation.
"Let me take my foliage home first and I'll swing by your place, absolutely."
She looks at cauliflower ear for a moment, then Sera, reaching out as she passes to brush fingers over her arm. It's the sort of gesture you see between friends. Albeit, usually friends that have known each other longer than a few hours but there's no real premeditation to it. That's just what Kiara's like, apparently. She's touchy feely. Or at least, she is when she leaves your company.
--
Good to her word, she does show up about an hour later at Corona Street. Denver's weather is deliberating on the approach of the winter months and the brunette is dressed with its indecisiveness in mind in a white trenchcoat and blouse, jeans and boots that ride up below her knees as she walks up the drive, making her approach. It's composed, her wardrobe. She could be newly arrived from an office or a night on the town. Her wrists and neck are opulent with adornments. It's these, amongst everything else, that might signify she could belong here. Could have a purpose coming to Sera's house, slipping in the open door with a brief rap of knuckles against it, one hand drawn into a pocket.
That and, given the circumstances, the way she feels on the approach. Nobody ever quite forgets Kiara's resonance when it hits them, at least, not the first time. Subsequently, well -- it's easy to get wrapped up in the sensation of being torn apart only to be shocked back into living, right?
SerafíneThe house at 719 Corona Street is a three-story blond-brick home. Four-square / craftsman style, built in the early part of the twentieth century, on a leafy, tree-lined street in one of those residential neighborhoods that has turned hip over the past dozen years. Close enough to walk to bars and restaurants, far enough from downtown that there are still plenty of single family houses - like this one.
The sidewalk winds through a slightly neglected garden that someone loved, once. Three or four steps lead up to a porch as wide as the house itself. There's a porch swing and a unicycle and a welcome mat and a couple of ashtrays and an empty keg waiting to be returned to the liquor store and a recycling and so on.
The front door is, as promised, open. The noise from inside is warm. There's music, somewhere, and it is hard to tell from here if it is live or an excellent stereo system.
Inside the foyer is a tall mahogany wardrobe that looks like an antique and a little side table and an umbrella stand and these layers of things. Coats and boots and objets d'art and canvases and tapestries and photographs, framed and unframed. The vibrance continues down the hall - where the scuffed old hardwoods are lined with worn Persian rugs, and contemporary - recent - art lines the walls, and porceline hummel figurines share space with the strangest sorts of contemporary pottery and on and on and on. A glimpse of the stairs shows a healthy spider plant in a macramed holder hanging from the ceiling, and three framed photos of Amelia Earhart on the landing.
The kitchen follows - white, renovated sometime in the last dozen years - with a window over the sink overlooking the garden, and a big eat-in table. There are a group of folks in there, some snacks laid out, a pitcher of drinks, people chatting, the hum not quite as loud as it was in the Pec, but still a hum. Dan - tall guy, blond beard, covered in tattoos - is coming in from the backyard as Kiara makes it in to the kitchen.
He lifts a hand.
"Sera's out back. Gin cocktails in the pitcher - gin, blueberries, rosemary - beer and white wine and water in the fridge. Red on the counter. Or if you're hankering for something else we've pretty much got a full bar in the dining room." This brief, half-cocked sort of grin splits through the beard. "Challenge me."
KiaraPerhaps she'll mention it to Sera later that night, if she's in a state to remember to, that she wishes she lived on a street like hers.
Residential, full of trees and leave-strewn footpaths, of cats that hiss when Kiara's boots startle them and dart out of sight, winding their bodies sinuously into shadows, especially this time of year when everything turns auburn and gold before it freezes. Kiara's apartment is part of the cityscape, certainly its sheathed inside antique walls that had seen and held the change of seasons, years, perhaps a century or two who knew, but it was a different creature to Sera's brick home with its porch swing and the careful layering of personality strewn within. Kiara's was no less her home but it wasn't, in every way, the perfect mold for her, a by station, perhaps. A pin on the map of her journey that she'd fill with items much as Sera's house is filled.
She touches things on her way in, the swell of music coaxing the brunette in past the wardrobe she slides the very tips of her fingers over, in beyond the side table and the umbrella stand, she's shrugging off her coat, draping it over an arm when Dan appears. She remembers him only as Dan-from-the-bar, the protector of Tequila from Grace and someone attached to her impression of Sera so far. Still, he gets a smile. She's never had a shortage of those to cast off.
"I'm a red kind of girl." Because of course she is, somehow, with her curling mouth and dark hair. "But I'll keep that in mind for later."
--
"Hey," this, Sera's greeting when Kiara heads out back, finds her by sense as much as sight, a wine glass cupped in one hand, picking her way across the grass to her. She's discarded her coat en route from kitchen to backyard and the blouse she's wearing underneath is sheer, silk with complicated buttons and short sleeves that leave her wrists a showpiece, heavy with silver and stones.
There's a slight jingle as she moves, sparing a thoughtful look over a shoulder toward the lit kitchen. "I think I let Dan down with my uncomplicated drink choices."
SerafíneThe house belongs to Dee, not Sera. The residential streets, the bones of the place are someone else's entirely. And yet that someone else belongs to Sera as much as people ever belong to other people. They are longtime friends and sometime lovers and occasional bandmates and their patterns have meshed in ways that ordinary people with ordinary lives and ordinary, linear ideas about love and friendship and family can understand.
And the rest of the things - those layers are Sera's entirely. Her resonance has soaked into the bones of the place. In every way that counts, it is assuredly both: hers, and her home.
-
Kiara tells Dan that she is a red kind of girl. Dan smirks. Such a lively intelligence behind that expression. He opens his mouth, laughs. No, he isn't surprised.
Since Kiara wants red there's no reason to open the fridge, so she never really sees that the beer selection is way better than the wine selection. Tonight the open bottle is a Malbec from Chile. Dan's ex, Jer, would turn his nose up at that open bottle.
Jeremy believes that vines need to suffer to produce a decent wine. He doesn't drink wine from South America or California or Australia or gods forbid, Colorado. Only from Europe: Spain, France, Italy. Perhaps - on a good day - Croatia. Maybe Crete.
--
"Naw."
The backyard is rather more sunk in shadow than the front. An impression of a rather large oak tree dead center, and an outbuilding - the garage - in the same blonde brick. Patio furniture, a cabana bed, a stone wall yes, but also views of the neighboring houses over every single vista. There is a slight slope to the yard and a flagstone patio set away from the house and there, a fire in one of those portable firepits. Sera in a camp chair - sitting forward, an ashtray on the ground beside her. She's smoking - not a joint but a clove cigarette, dark paper, an impression of gold foil around the filter, the scent of spice and burnt sugar heavier in the air than the tobacco itself.
"He's a guitarist, not a mixologist. He's just fucking hospitable. He's cool, too. You know, Cool. Have a seat. I've got another joint around here somewhere."
Kiara"Grazie," she says, with all the lazy impreciseness of someone who's never learned a lick of Italian in her life but knows occasional, offhand platitudes and rattles them off as such, folding herself easily into a camp chair across from the other woman. She takes possession of it much the way she had that booth in the restaurant.
With total ease, there's an aura of confidence to that. The ability to perch yourself on the edge of someone's world and look quite content about the situation. If she's unsure about the fact she's in a stranger's house (or a stranger's friend's house more to the point) with a glass of wine in her hand and the heady curl of spice and sugar in the air, she cages it away convincingly enough. Folds it behind dark eyes and hair that spills, loose and wave-strewn over her shoulders.
The firepit radiates companionable warmth and Kiara folds her legs out in front of her, angling them toward it, like a flower might unfurl toward the sunlight. Perhaps without conscious thought. Instinctual. "He plays?" This interests her, or maybe more correctly, it interests her in relation to the way it coaxes another morsel of detail loose about Sera's world. Or at least - the one she exists in. Those who gravitate around it.
"I love to hear him sometime."
Sera's got another joint somewhere. Kiara's mouth hooks into a smile around her wineglass as she takes a sip. Watches the hunt for the missing joint quietly, companionably but for the fact they're relative strangers, ships in the night. Of course, barely having someone's acquaintance doesn't always stop Kiara, either.
She likes the slipways between the straight and narrow, the acceptable and uncouth. "The people tonight, " she's nursing that wine glass against her throat, cradling it there so the fire dances in the glass's reflection. "At The Pec, they're cool, too, I'm guessing." There's a question minced in there somewhere, wrapped up in her words.
"Kalen and Grace." She invokes their names.
SerafíneThere's no one else out here tonight, just now, whether by chance or design. No - it must be by design, because otherwise the guests tonight - maybe a dozen, maybe left, not a real party, which, here, sometimes seem to expand the walls of the house and can on sometimes last for days and days - would be out here, arrayed around the firepit despite the chill in the air.
While Kiara takes a seat - perches so easily on one of those camp chairs - and her eyes start to make the adjustment to the uncertain smolder of light, Sera makes this move that is half-way between uncurling and unfurling and digs out the edge of a fleece blanket for Kiara to wrap around her shoulders and spine. The fire will keep half of her warm. The blankets, maybe still warm from someone else's body, will do the rest.
Sera has one wrapped around her shoulders. It's that outdoor thing one does, in the autumn, nearing winter. She's cross-legged in the camp chair, the fleece wrapped around her shoulders like a refugee, and Kiara cannot see it but she has changed clothes from her short little leather skirt and bustier to a slightly oversized sweater knitted to look like a cheeseburger. Tan for the buns, lines of color for the burger and toppings, this ruffle of green representing the lettuce. Sera, of course, wears her cheeseburger sweater as a dress, paired with fishnets, and wears it as thoughtlessly and as easily as she does anything else.
"He's fucking amazing," Sera informs Kiara, with obvious affection and admiration lacing her voice as she pats around to find that joint and light it up. "We've got a band. I'll text you next time we've got a gig, if you want, but you might be able to hear him tonight if he's in the mood."
This quick grin, more suggested by the curve of her cheek, where it is gilded with firelight, than seen through the shadows.
"And yeah, Kalen and Grace are cool, too. Like every other human being on this fucking planet, they can be kinda strange sometimes, but they're definitely cool. Kalen's a Hermetic. Grace is a VA," the joint has been found, and Sera supplies this information as she sparks it, inhales.
Then she's passing it on, passing it around, holding all that smoke deep within her chest. Feeling her blood start to swim, smiling around the feeling as she leans forward, reaches around the fire to pass the joint to Kiara.
Grins as she exhales that lungful of smoke she'd been holding in, all-at-once, as if were an all-or-nothing girl.
"I'll give you seventeen guesses to figure out my Tradition."
Generous thing, Sera.
Kiara"I'll do whatever it takes to get him in the mood, I want to hear this." Pronounced with a decisive look back over her shoulder toward the lit kitchen, a swing back of her focus to Sera. A flash of teeth and a wolfy, playful expression. She adjusts the fleece around her shoulders, settles back to hear Kalen is a Hermetic. Grace is a Virtual Adept. Kiara's brows knit briefly, in consternation, in consideration. "Huh," a punctuation at the revelation. Her head cants as if she's conjuring up the memory of both.
"I guess that would make sense."
Kiara takes a drag on the joint and its with the exhale that she laughs, passing it back and smiling in return, tracing the air a little with the hand not preoccupied with a glass of wine, outlining Sera's cross-legged form, huddled under her fleece. "I knew some Cultists in New York, nice people, offered to get high the first night we met at a club." There's that smile again, the dimple in a cheek threatens, she surrenders her glass to the grass for a beat in order to draw up the hair around her shoulders, twist it over one shoulder. "We used to hang out sometimes. New York was a good scene. Dangerous, but good."
Her jewellery rattles, silver flickers and gleams around her wrists, neck. A few of the bracelets have charms hanging off them, pentagrams, glyphs of some account, what could be mistaken for a peace sign but closer inspection will reveal to be a woman standing with her arms raised.
Addressing the sky, some greater force, some God, some Goddess. Maybe all of them. "If I'm not just talking in garish stereotypes," she snags back her wine, directing a look that's all edged humor Sera's way, the way her eyes look near-black in her uncertain light. "That's what I'd guess. Though I could be." Making use of stereotypes. The joint is seeping through her veins, a pleasant mellowness infecting her senses, making the world burn a little brighter at the edges. The fire is casting long shadows over their skin and Kiara's face is half phantom, slipping and sliding out of focus. "It's always a little fucking odd, making introductions. Throwing affiliations out there. I meet people and I'm not sure if I want to shake their hand, kiss them or just make them really uncomfortable for a minute."
There's something to the way she curses. Some people curse and make an apology of it, not Kiara. She says fuck and its visceral. Raw. She means it for what it is, that's there in the curl of her mouth, too.
"Maybe I should do all three. Cover my bases." She takes another sip of wine. "I'm what you'd call a natural witch. Verbena. Or heathen, depending who you asked." She licks at the lingering trace of wine on her lips, shrugs a thin shoulder and the fleece slips low for a moment. Bares a slip of skin and silk and the tangled knot of necklaces hanging from her neck.
"Though if I get to choose, I usually run with pagan." The corners of the brunette's mouth quirk.
SerafíneKiara will do whatever it takes to get Dan in the mood. Sera flashes a responsive grin, this quick glimpse of her teeth, neatly set within her mobile little mouth. The grin settles into something else, something not precisely secretive, but half-sealed, both aware of and containing her pleasures inside her.
Dan is, after all, usually in the mood.
Then Sera is: listening, her own gaze soft in the cool darkness, illuminated by the flames. And she's high, already, and getting higher, reaching for the joint as Kiara hands it back, holding with a careful and familiar precision. "I hate it. The introductions shit. Blah blah blah blah blah blah bani blah. I don't think I've ever actually told any of them my fucking Tradition, but they all know so I don't think it matters. Or think they know. I mean, I suppose by almost every measure I am a garish fucking stereotype."
Which is: also, true, though Sera doesn't seem to mind it, especially on a night like this, the fire and the buzz and the warmth of the house, friends outlined here and there in the windows. Music from somewhere seeping through the glass.
"Maybe that's wrong." A quick, thoughtful little shrug matched by a half-smile wrapped up in smoke and memories. She is: holding her breath again, holding it in, and the THC makes her feel like she is: expanding and expanding and expanding. "I must've told Grace because I met her like three days after she woke up. Kept trying to claim her for me and mine but she liked her computers too much.
"So. What brought you from New York to Denver?"
KiaraThe smoke and the wine and the fire invoke a familiar brand of contentment in Kiara, she's looking into the licking flames when Sera asks the question; the why-have-you-come and what-brings-you-here question that so often draws a shadow over the brunette's easy smiles and bright, teasing eyes.
It's the subtle sort, that shadow. Not all at once or the sort that causes her to pull right back (physically and otherwise) but the kind that seeps in like a stain. She's smiling across at Sera's talk of introduction shit and blah blah and being a stereotype (because evidently, Kiara houses some agreement perhaps on her own account about being exactly the sort of creature people envision when they hear of her Tradition) and then she's considering the firepit and wordlessly accepting the joint back in time to lift it to her lips and take a drag.
Hold it in while her red lips cradle the paper and herb and she's quieter than seems typical, for the woman the Cultist knows her to be thus far in their (arguably short) acquaintance. And there'll be more occasions for Kiara Woolfe's face to adopt that half thoughtful, half contained expression. In a few nights from now Alexander will ask her what would make her stay in Denver and she'll tell him she'll let him know when she knows, because sometimes it's far easier to just run faster than stop to look over your shoulder at what's giving chase.
The difference between a few nights later and now being Kiara's half way to high and her blood is full to overflowing with wine and weed. And the company - perhaps that, too. "It's a long way from Manhattan." She sits back a little; breathing it out with a whirl of smoke. "There was an attack on my coven - " she rubs her thumb against the edge of her mouth; the joint tipping ash into the folds of her fleece. "My mentor's, technically. Mine by virtue of being a thorn in their side." Her mouth curls in the corner briefly, the line between her brows smoothes and she leans in to pass the joint back with careful motions, her eyes half buried in shadow the way her hair falls over her shoulders; lacing around her neck, her jewellery offers a melodic accompaniment to every small movement Kiara makes.
"Aisling, she was fucking crazy." Kiara's smiling, it's a fond, warm thing. "Always pushing for more. Asking for reasons. Wanting to 'see the change' while she sat on the sidelines and let the new kids do the heavy lifting. There was a lot of - " Kiara gestures at the air. A quick, half wave. Dismissive. "Politics, whatever. They liked their matching robes and pure bloodlines and I - didn't exactly fit the mold. And then - " The smile's less. Tempered by the fact she's high. It feels distant, New York, Aisling. The blood and the chaos and the pounding in her head screaming at her to runrunrun.
"Technocracy." That's all she says, but it says enough. That she's drinking from her wine. That her eyes rest on something over Sera's shoulder rather than her, in the moment. "They made a mess, we cleaned it up and got the hell out." She makes it perfunctory. Leaves the worst of it out. Doesn't mention the nightmares or the fact she tamps down on the bone deep urge to keep running every other day. Maybe Kiara figures Sera can fill in the dots, or that everyone has their own demons and her own are nothing so unusual. Scars came in various forms, after all and they were all of them on borrowed time. In one way or another.
Serafíne(mnemosyne @ 6:34PM
Awareness-as-empathyRoll: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8) ( success x 6 ) )
--
Marijuana does that, doesn't it? Somehow both anchors you in your skin and in the place in the world that skin occupies and wraps you up in a remarkably physical cocoon. Right now, just now, you're here. Here is your hand, and here is your tongue, in your mouth, and here is the iron in your blood. The sorrow in your heart stays in your heart and it is transforming and transformed but also somehow fixed, the way the stars feel so very fixed even as they wheel across the sky. Everything else gets to be so very far away.
The casual question, the familiar rhythm, the call-and-response, the exchange of strangers getting-to-know each other becomes something else. Ask anybody else in the house behind them what brought you to Denver and you'll get an easy answer, probably, framed maybe by some lingering grief over a breakup or a lost job or some other path not taken. Ask someone Awake, and - well - maybe you get the same sort of story, Maybe you get this. There's no way to know until it happens.
Still, Sera knows. She can feel it in the air she breathes, can sense the minute changes in Kiara's demeanor, the slow-seep of that shadow over the other woman's eyes. Something still, oh, quick about her attention - open, you understand, aching because human beings have hearts and hearts were made to ache - but also strangely respectful of the space that Kiara creates for herself, takes for herself in those moments.
Sera watches, and listens, and is keenly, sharply aware that Kiara is not meeting her eyes, and instead fixes on some point - the garden wall, in its crumbling shadows, perhaps - over Sera's shoulder, beyond the dazzle of the flames. That familiar dialectic then: affection and grief in equal measure.
"I'm sorry," Sera murmurs. She snags Kiara's gaze when she can, and there is an awareness, a depth of feeling behind what is otherwise a remarkably pat phrase. Sera is sorry that Kiara suffered through any of that, all of that. "How long ago?"
KiaraIt's possible that Kiara didn't lay the facts out like a line of bones: here is the barest, simplest core of why and how and when for sympathy but - maybe she offered it as some kind of peacepipe. Some glimpse, some insight to trust her reasons in this, if not anything else.
It's easy to trust in the horror, somehow, that their mutual enemy offers. It's an understood menace, the enemy always there. Outside their line of sight but never exactly ... gone. Lingering like the days old stench of smoke clinging to the walls inside an abandoned hotel room that you could still breathe in. Still identify and resent, long after the fact. It's probable that she didn't share what happened in New York for some underhanded reason, at least, it doesn't strike Sera as any sort of malicious lie or dramatic re-telling to invoke her compassion the way Kiara offers it up, the way she stares over Sera's shoulder for a moment as if reimagining those events, suspended in time.
I'm sorry.
Kiara's eyes tick to the other woman's and she has to lift her shoulders at that, tilt her mouth into a smile that's equally rueful and aware and a little mellowed by the drug in her system. "I was - am - too. I guess." A frown surfaces, then. Dark eyes drop and it's worth noting the brunette has thick lashes, they're long and pretty, like a doll's. There's a lot about Kiara that could be deemed so. Delicate, yet deceptively so with her sharp features and keen, dark eyes. There's the hint of the other about her, somehow. For as bewitching as her smiles and dancing eyes might appear, it's there somewhere in her devouring, rejuvenating nature. The strength of deep roots, the timelessness of nature, the wheel of life and death.
"Months, now." She seems a little surprised at the fact, Kiara, frowning down at that mostly consumed wine glass. "It feels longer, weirdly, but - months. Kept driving and then suddenly - ta da." She glances over the fire at Sera, smiling again, laughing a little, because it's very hard not to feel at least a little buzzed, no matter the topic. She shuffles forward a little, curling her legs around the chair. "What about you - why here."
SerafíneSera reaches out to take the joint back. There's not much left, just a little roach, more paper than pot, which she nips neatly between a peeling black-and-silver nail and inhales with the same savor as if it were her first hit of the night. And it sure as hell isn't her first hit of the night, but she's smiling now, an expression that is not wide but is somehow deep, full of strange and gleaming currents, which have a fair bit to do with tragedy and loss and how time passes and how its passage surprises us all, even Disciples who study it, who can slice it open, push it forward, peel it back. Who know that somehow everywhen is now.
"Dan and I met in Brooklyn," an expressive little shrug, this undulant coil of her body beneath it, and then she is leaning forward and reaching down, searching out a little roach clip to attach to the joint. Surgical scissors or something, who fucking knows, but they work just right and Sera fixes them to a corner of the remaining rolling paper with a certain degree of expertise, born of long experience, then hands the dregs back over and waves off any further passes. Kiara can finish it up. Sera's pulling out a pack of kreteks and sliding out one of the clove-spiced cigarettes, lighting it up with a crackle of sugar, spice and smoke. "A few years ago. I wasn't there long, but he'd been around a bit. Fuck, you guys might have some friends in common. He knew about us before he met me. Anyway, we started noodling around with this drummer who was home from Duke for the summer and it sounded fucking good. Dan can work anywhere and me - I didn't really wanna stay in New York, so we followed him down to North Carolina.
"There's a pretty decent music scene in Raleigh-Durham, you know? Made a bunch of friends. Then our drummer graduated and decided that he was more interested in going to medical school in the Caribbean - one of those goddamned islands - than in kicking around in a band for the rest of his life.
"Hooked up with Dee and Rick, then. Dee graduated that spring and Rick the next December and we probably wouldn't've ever ended up here, except Dee's from Denver. Her aunt died and left her this place, and since nothing was really happening in North Carolina that couldn't happen in Denver, well. We picked up and came here. I've been here, fuck. A year and a half, maybe two years.
"Guess I'm starting to feel at home."
KiaraKiara watches Sera make light work of the joint; entertaining the way her fingers move with the deft surety of the regular partaker. Her elbow comes to rest on the arm of the camp chair, edging in, propping up her palm as she falls into the ready trace of the high. Sera is lighting something that smells oriental and Kiara's eyes linger on the process even after she's passed back the joint; holding it easily between two fingers. She and Dan might have friends in common, the brunette hmms and inclines her head, dragging away her hand to breathe in smoke and after a held moment -- release. It curls upward, dissipating into the darkness without.
"I wouldn't be surprised, it's a small world. Connectivity ... " Kiara points, joint between her fingers over the fire at Sera. The bracelets slide against her wrist, there's a crackle as a log burns, insects dancing in the illumination the fire offers. The Verbena looks wild and lovely, her red mouth curled in a satisfied way. "Nature has a way of pursuing what's meant to be. She finds out how."
Sera talks of the band, of graduations and departures and Dee's house and Kiara breaks in, almost subconsciously after I'm starting to feel at home with --
"I really love this house." She cranes her head back, to half glimpse the top most shadow of the roof, the edge of the balcony, something. The line of her neck, the way the hair falls away from her face, there's something so libertine in her movements. "Don't get me wrong I love my apartment but it's so city and I miss - God, this." She drifts back, a hand draping low to brush the ground; tease it with her fingertips. "Trees. Grass. Being close to Her. It's -- I miss that in a high rise. This place, though -- " And here Kiara's glancing around, smilingly, back to Sera. "It has good heart. People look at the foundations but you have to feel, too."
She fists a handful of hair, rakes it back. "Would you listen to me?" She points across at the Cultist, again. "This is why I don't get high all the time. I turn into Hemingway going on about his old man and the sea. It's good, though - " Ah, that interconnectivity is back, the to and fro of the inebriated. " - that you feel at home. Chase that feeling. I'm still a progress pending on it."
Serafíne"That's pretty much why I do get high all the time." Sera's eyes are dark, more shadow than light, somehow banked in the firelight and her attention is rapt in a way that feels somehow pinned: on Kiara, on her expressive mouth. "I like it when people turn into Hemingway. Well, if I'm being honest, I usually give Hemingway a big fuck you, which might be fucking unfair but I know the people who love him, and they usually feel pretty shirty to me."
Sera isn't using the term shirty to avoid saying shitty. She means shirty and says so with a wry expression.
"I'd prefer Dylan Thomas or Anne Sexton or fucking Baudelaire or Mina Loy, you know?
"There is no Space or Time." This quickling grin, the sort that feels as if her mouth cannot contain it, "only intensity.
"And tame things," a sharp little pause, "Have no immensity."
"You can come here any time you like, you know? Feel connected to whoever the fuck she is. Get high or don't get high, whatever the hell you want. Stay as long as you like."You know, home isn't really the feeling I'm chasing," another smile, liquid mercury. " - but it's nice to have it there when I come back down."
Sera takes another drag from her kretek then bends over and stubs it out in the ashtray on the frozen ground beneath her camp chair. Straightens and watches as Kiara finishes off the remainder of that joint.
"Will you freak out if I kiss you?"
KiaraShe likes it when people turn into Hemingway and Kiara's sitting there, smiling at her, fingers housed near her mouth, the last of that joint poised to rage against the dying of its light as she talks of poets and intensity. Mina Loy's words hanging there, suspended in the moment above their heads and she's not looking directly at Sera when she asks (will you freak out) but away, face turned out into the darkness then, listening without listening to the chatter and movements from within signifying the party was still in full swing inside.
The Verbena at her leisure, hand braced on a knee, the last of that joint smoking barely between long fingertips, silver and stones gleaming in the firelight and her face tilted just so as if to catch something she's feeling for beyond the range of human senses. "Nature, is the She. Though there are countless names. A lot of reinvention." Conversational, that. Kiara in the moment with the fall of her dark hair and pretty eyes and expressive mouth. "But I'm not really a girl big on fitting a name on things. It's what it is, she is, what she is."
(if I kiss you)
She takes in one last hit from that joint and uncurls herself a little; the fleece sliding down her shoulders as she twists, sitting up.
"No." A moment; a measure; Kiara looking across at her with open interest; her dark hair falling loose around that white blouse of hers where the fleece has dipped down to rug up around her waist. The buttons still look complicated. Her lipstick is a little duller for the wine and smoking, there's a smudge of it on the pad of one of her thumbs, also a hint of ash and the moment suspends -- fire and wine and smoke and Kiara's eyes glinting over the space between them --
(tame things)
(no immensity)
-- before she stretches out the fingers on one hand, wiggles them invitingly. "Come and kiss me."
SerafíneNothing about Sera's outfit just now looks anywhere as close to complicated as the buttons on Kiara's blouse. Sometime between their brief encounter at The Pec and Kiara's arrival on Corona Street, Sera changed out of her leather skirt and bustier and into this absurd knit cheeseburger sweater, complete with a green ruffle by way of lettuce and felt suggestions of sesame seeds. It makes for a very short dress that is nevertheless longer than most of her skirts. The way the hem falls just beneath the curve of her ass as she, invited, stands.
Swaying a bit but Sera's always swaying and these camp chairs are steady only in the aggregate, when they're unfolded and their occupant has decided that she will take up the space she needs with some amount of decorum.
Cheeseburger sweater and fishnets encasing her legs and these mukluk style slippers on her feet and calves: absurd, as she shakes looks her blanket and unwinds her legs from the strange twist of its tail end, oddly elegant, absolutely sure. Beneath the absurd costume this evening, Sera is rather small, rather sharp and rather arresting. Smiling at Kiara, reaching out to take her hand as she circles the fire pit. Those wiggling fingers, which she tangles with her own, reaching with her thumb for the smear of lipstick on Kiara's.
Aware of it, see? Her narrow frame casts Kiara in a long slice of banded shadows. An impression of Sera's hand left in the firelight, dark with tattoos, as she reaches to slide her fingers through Kiara's dark hair, to cup the back of her skull and bend her head back. Sera, her face enshadowed, blond hair outlined in firelight, open-eyed, smiling down as she studies the curve of Kiara's mouth,
and then bends down, with absolute certainty, and claims it.
KiaraShe'll leave Dee's house smelling like oriental cigarettes and weed. There are worse things to find cloying to your skin, leaving an impression in your clothing, though. Often it's incense, with Kiara. The tangle of smells that predict or farewell a person's presence. The olfactory resonance of a soul. Kiara Woolfe is sandalwood and myrrh, merlot and the untraceable faint stirrings of something earthy; the forest talking after the storm; the sweet sharp scent of nature re-awakening.
Sera's gathering herself up to transverse the tricky pathway between her campchair, the firepit and Kiara's outstretched fingers and the other woman breathes out a laugh, half-subvocal, mostly a surrasus of amusement and anticipation and when Sera and her cheeseburger sweater in all its green ruffled glory finds her way around, she's waiting. Her legs encased in denim and leather, one half bent to offer a v shaped space for all of Sera's sharp angles; for the swoop and swallow of the shadows as they fall across the brunette's body, cast her face into some inky impression of smiling eyes and the fall of dark hair.
Sera has her hand, has a handful of that hair in another moment and bends Kiara's head back; she flows into the motion, bares the length of her neck. Her blouse cuts away at the collar; dipping into a vee before those tiny pearl buttons begin and there's detail this close. The little studs two a-piece in each ear; visible only because Sera snags back her hair; forces Kiara's head to adopt a steeper angle. The smell of woodsmoke on her skin; the way the slivers of light cut across the coils of the necklaces she wears; the glow of the fire on her skin where it finds it.
The taste of wine on her lips, when she finally bends and claims it.
Kiara moves into the embrace the same easy way she does Sera's claim on her hair; bending her neck back. Is kissed and kisses back and reaches up to touch Sera's neck, wrist heavy with jewellery. The gentle chime and clink of them heralding the moment as her palm slides down, shaping and mapping the curve to shoulder, down to bicep where they curl. "Hm," a pull back enough to be felt against her mouth, then. A reverberation of laughter; the whisper-breath of easy hunger. "Delectable."
SerafíneSera's breath is smokey and humid, the rush of it against the other woman's mouth when Kiara breaks away enough to pronounce something delectible. The kiss or the wine or the fire or the way the shadows cut right across her body, the interplay between the heat of the fire and the November chill bright and crisp in the air, away from the circle of heat. The distant suggestion of the party, on the other side of the illuminated windows and doors.
Not much of one tonight, and you know that because they have the garden entirely to themselves and there is only the suggestion of music reverberating inside, rather than the fact of it, the thump thump thump of bass, deep enough to be resonant in the hollow spaces that have been worked into the human body and human bones.
The kiss is almost - no, not chaste, but there's a kind of exploratory and thoroughly stoned gentleness to the way Sera's mouth moves over Kiara's. Opens, but only just, enough for Kiara to break away and hum a pleased response that makes Sera laugh.
Laugh and kiss her again, with more intent. Opening, coaxing, deepening.
There is want in Sera. There is always such want in Sera, but tonight it is cushioned, sweetly, by the high. Made tender, perhaps even mournful, by the brief sketch of tragedy - and her own awareness of the currents beneath it - Kiara has shared.
This time Sera does not stop until she is breathless, until her lungs are burning with air-hunger, and when she does she does not go far. Just pants softly against Kiara's mouth, still cupping the back of Kiara's dark head as she leans forward, that a certain grace in the way she holds that awkward angle. When she does she is smiling, see? Radiant, lovely.
"Come meet my friends. It's warm inside."
KiaraSera kisses her with the tenderness of the stoned; the lush exploratory press of lips to lips and Kiara kisses her back with some sense of building hunger. It begins as gentle as Sera intends it to be but on the return; Kiara's grip is on her arm and she opens her mouth beneath the second, deeper onslaught with a growing hunger.
Nips at her lower lip on the breathless breakaway; just once; just so and opens her eyes to greet the other woman's smiling expression. To return it with a smile that's easy; pleasured and pleased and at her leisure to return for more if the inclination was in her. There is want in Sera, she can feel it in Kiara, in the somewhat reluctance of her hand to leave her arm; to untangle herself and climb to her feet.
To finger comb some suggestion of timidity back into her hair; tousled and suggestive as it stands.
"Are they going to ask about my intentions? I may need more wine for that."
It's a tease, a lightly thrown challenge as she scoops up that mostly consumed glass of wine and discards the fleece in favor of braving the chill the lone minutes it'll take them to navigate up the lawn. Kiara's hand finds the small of Sera's back at some point; a subtle pressure there. Guiding and comforting, perhaps.
A necessity of touch, maybe.
She never pushes into it, though. It's there and then gone, much as it had been as she left the restaurant earlier. Kiara had spoken of needing a grounding to nature, perhaps in her own small way, Sera, as do others now and then, has become her conduit for it this evening. They were all energy, after all.
Serafíne"That's fucking rich," Sera tosses back, warm and bright and giddy. The night liquid around her and Kiara close. Sera is letting her hand slide from the tangle of Kiara's dark locks to cup her jaw briefly, to slide a thumb over the lush edge of Kiara's mouth, and then letting go, stepping back, holding out a hand to help pull Kiara upright as she divests herself of the fleece and scoops up her wine and fingercombs her hair into some semblance of normality.
It doesn't matter. Everyone inside will know that Kiara has been kissed from the state of her lipstick when they slip back through the sliding glass doors into the kitchen.
"Dan might ask you what you like for breakfast."
This is Sera. Sliding, peripheral, smiling this strangely private sort of smile, her lower lip caught between her teeth as they pick their way across the dark, cold garden, down the slight slope toward the patio hard against the house, and the glass sliders and the strange, rather orchestral murmur of strangers' voices.
"Or Dee. She works in a bakery. How do you feel about croissants?"
That's when Kiara's hand finds the small of Sera's back, and Sera breathes in, and this Kiara can feel, the organic expansion of the muscles flanking and framing her spine and Sera turns, this time lifting her chin - if slightly - reaching for Kiara to pull her close and kiss her again.
Less reverent this time. A little more giddy, a little more wanton. Her hands fold around, framing Kiara's waist.
"I'm wearing something way fucking hotter underneath this sweater, you know - " This, laughing, when they part again, and Sera reaches for the handle of the door, sliding it familiarly open to let the two of them back into the kitchen.
KiaraShe was asked once, Kiara, years ago now in a tangle of sheets, propped against pillows with a view of New York City below her, newly Awakened, newly bewitched with the world and the violence of it, what are you, what does this mean as if the answer would quantify and validate the time spent between sheets or pressed against another person's skin.
Labels are for losers, she'd retorted then. Smiled and beckoned and drawn her lover of the time back into warm kisses and it was easy when it was. Sex had always been the easiest of dynamics. It was the human politics of the heart that made it messy. So much of New York in her later time there had been a volatile delight. But it also became harder, the further down the rabbit hole she went.
Lives changed. The path of Kiara Awakened splintered from Kiara Sleeping. Some things changed because it was what was necessary; nature was stoic on that front. It did not hate nor love but simply endure. Kiara continued; adapted; evolved. No less a smiling, charismatic woman with easy graces and a quick mind but her edges grew more pronounced. You cannot stare down the finality of death (belief in the cycle, comprehension of rebirth aside) without something in yourself finding alteration.
This Kiara, the one with smudged lipstick; laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation; of being high and half drunk and questioned on her pastry preferences; was different. How many skins did we shed in the progression of one life to the next, anyway. Sera's hands on her waist; Kiara's fingers on her face as she's kissed again and breathes out a brief, sharp noise at that tease.
The twist of her mouth; a spasm of protracted amusement. "Hotter than this?" A draw back; the slide and frame of her hands to Sera's waist to display that fucking hamburger ensemble. "I'm not sure I believe that's possible."
Inside; then. Kiara buzzing and her blouse creasing at the edges where she's been sitting. She looks the picture of a woman taken for a roll in the hay; smudged red mouth; tousled hair. Half empty wine glass and that suggestive, playful little something edging there in the corners of her smile.
"I'm a coffee in the morning person." She bumps her hip against the door; a counter. "Black. I like the bitterness."
SerafíneThere is a loose knot of people in the kitchen. More women than men tonight. There are other loose knots of people elsewhere in the house. It is a night of loose knots and strange loops.
The music in the background is rather low and slightly - not sinister, precisely, though perhaps there is an exoticism beneath the basic two-guitar bar-band sound that lacks definition until the singer's voice returns, speaking some other language without even the familiarity of the Romance languages. Some of the gutteral harshness of Germanic tongues, without the peculiarly nasal intonation.
The smell of smoke dissipates in here. There's a fire somewhere in the fireplace but otherwise they don't smoke much - not joints, not Sera's kreteks - inside.
"It is fucking possible," Sera insists, spinning as she climbs up the step and over the threshold into the house, reaching to lift up the hem of the hamburger sweater over her hips, flashing, you know, everyone to show off a pair of ruffled - well, perhaps they are closer to bloomers - black edged with white, garters attached to her fishnets to hold them up. "See?"
Showoff. Somewhere, someone wolf-whistles and therefore Sera lifts the hem up a bit higher because why the fuck not? Kiara settles in the kitchen, leaning a hip against the countertop and Sera levers herself up to sit on the counter, reaching out to trace the snaking line the overhead lights define in the shine of Kiara's dark hair.
Dan pours Kiara more Malbec, if she wants some. He also sets Sera up with a shot of tequila, without question or complaint.
And it's Dan who really reacts to Kiara's comment, about coffee and bitterness, with a direct look at Kiara and her smudged mouth and her toussled hair, and another framing glance at Serafíne. This pull of a smirk framed by his beard, a kind of remove that is not precisely remoteness in his eyes as he glances back at Kiara.
"French press or drip?" He asks. He's trying to figure out what kind of hipster she is, Dan. And perhaps, whether she will really be here in the morning. He won't even entertain the idea that she might like one of those single-serve coffee machines. They're so wasteful.
KiaraSera flashes her (well, everyone) and Kiara's cheeks threaten a set of dimples. It's a sweet thing set amongst the sharper aspects of the brunette. Kiara's presence suggests edginess. Or well -- the easy elegance of her attire coupled with the necklaces and bracelets heavy on her limbs suggest it more so. A juxtaposition of office worker meets bohemian chic.
"I stand corrected." That, as she collects a newly refilled glass of Malbec; casts the collected souls in the kitchen brief, measuring looks. Dan her attention settles with; traces the looks and the easy assurance in the way he pours drinks, feels in relation to the space they're in. There's a certain degree of familiarity in the fact he wants to know about her coffee predilections.
French press or drip.
Kiara's eyebrow punctuates her expression: "Do I want to be held accountable for slaughtering the essence of coffee? Press, my dear fellow. Press." She inclines her chin at that, holds Dan's eyes for a moment in quiet intensity on the issue before her mouth surrenders into a smile.
"Though if you offer me drip I'll contain my judgement to silent reproach." A sip from her glass. "It's only polite."
SerafínePress. Kiara declares, and Dan breathes out a laugh that seems entirely in synch with Sera's own. Just an octave or so lower but he's laughing, uncrossing his arms and reaching for his beer and then resettling against the counter, glancing at the tall young man with whom he has been flirting all night, and back to Kiara. Still grinning, shaking his head.
"Woman after my own heart," Dan is telling Kiara, lifting his gaze in a banked flash to Sera, who is threading her left hand through Kiara's hair again, watching her profile from that strange angle - above and behind - that sitting on the counter grants her, saying nothing right now.
"Sera drinks tea - "
"Darjeeling," Sera inserts, and Dan flashes her an affectionate look.
" - too much time on the continent. Now, let me see. Do you have any tattoos and how do you feel about the Pixies?"
KiaraWoman after my own heart.
She crooks her mouth at that, Kiara, wings him a look that's contained and confident and all sorts of pleased to be considered so. She's housing that wine glass against her hip; fingers curled around it while Sera's fingers play in the fall of her hair. It's thick and smells distractingly like some sort of herbal blend of shampoo, the wave in it cannot be natural but it does suit her; the brunette with her dark, dark eyes and occasional Mona Lisa smiles.
All containment and confidence and yet banking there beneath the surface, something entirely more -- vital. Temperance, Aisling had named Kiara. A card for every newcomer to her fold. The alchemy and the balance; the weaving of the elements to create the whole.
Now let me see -- she laughs, once. Bright and happy and her head is still full of the joint and the fact she's being questioned after all is somehow reason enough to laugh and shake her head a little; lower her chin and listen before nodding. "Tattoos, one." She twists a little; gesturing at the small of her back. There's a glyph there, at the base of the spine, beneath that sheer blouse. Thick, black lines that make up the symbol for Choku Rei, the Reiki line and spiral for the power of the universe; the healer's keystone. "I designate points for anyone who sees it and doesn't ask me if it means peace or love. Piercings, four." She adds that in, off hand.
Dismissive, since they were only in her lobes.
"The Pixies ..." Kiara pauses for the dramatics of it, lifts the wine glass to her lips and takes a sip, raising her eyebrows across the room at Dan. The tension builds, she seems to enjoy it. "They're alright, I suppose." A head tilt, a wolfy grin and she leans a little further into the play of Sera's fingers through her hair.
Like a feline arching its spine beneath the caress of an owner's hand.
SerafíneTemperance. Christ, what the hell would Serafíne know about fucking temperance, but here she's vibing utterly on someone a now-lost waking dream named temperance and it hardly matters because she doesn't know but -
temperance. temperance, and that sense of containment. The surety of it, of whom does that remind her? It hardly matters. Sera licks the salt from her skin - the webbing of her palm - and tosses back the shot Dan prepared for her and bites a lime after, the volatile oils a bright scent in the air. She does all this with her left hand because her right hand is still buried in Kiara's hair, sliding through its length, seeking, seeking, this sure but quiet pressure.
--
Dan is covered in tattoos. More than can really be counted. Sera has fewer tattoos but even on casual glimpse, more than a few are visible. Something big on one forearm, all this text around her palms, the outline of a pair of scissors on hte palm of her left hand, the scissors turning into a shark, or the shark turning in to the handle of the scissors, impossible to saw now which came first.
"Alright you suppose?!" Dan exclaims, animate now. "Jesus fuck. You know the albums they were putting out in the 1980s sound as current - maybe even more current, than a helluva lot of shit out there now.
"Why don't you get your guitar," Sera is asking Darn, with this peripheral half-smile, " - and we'll do Mr. Grieves or Gigantic and show her how wrong she is?"
And it could be that she's sending Dan off because Kiara wanted to hear him play, and it could be that she's doing it for far more selfish reasons, because the hand in Kiara's hair becomes a seeking pressure, cupping the other woman's skull, turning it back to her, and lifitng, lifting, until Sera can find Kiara's mouth once again.
A slow kiss this time, at the edge of sweet, and cocooned in light.
