He'd cleaned the blood off of his phone, but he could still see it. Like Lady MacBeth, insistent on a spot that no one else saw, but he knew it was there. He knew it was there, and all he wanted to do was throw the damned phone away but then he would have to explain what happened to it. he would have to lie and say it got stolen or lost and he would have to talk to his parents and they would sigh and just buy him another one because that's what they did. They spent a small fortune sending him to a school he wanted to go to. Funded a lifestyle that supported two people instead of one, even if he didn't actually live in that apartment anymore, and he wasn't sure why he was thinking about his parents or his phone and he wanted to throw up but there wasn't any food in his stomach and there wasn't anything that seemed like it wouldn't taste like raw meat-
And there was a morbid curiosity. Something that crept in slow and sickly and wondered what about the sensations as so addictive. If it was the power, if it was the fact that you could consume and take another person's being into your own. That you gain strength from someone else's heart, and he couldn't help but want to get sick thinking about it but he didn't have anything in his stomach to vacate and he wanted to drink but even tequila was going to taste like blood and-and-and
Exhale.
Exhale again.
Exhale until there was no air left in your lungs and his mind wandered. It wandered often, but there he was in the kitchen of the chantry, making sandwiches and going on autopilot, making food that he knew he wasn't going to eat. Peanut butter with apricot jelly because grape and strawberry had the wrong texture and he knew he needed to eat something. Eat something. Eat something or else…
Inhale.
SerafíneThe day after, perhaps two days after the denouement at Victoria's compound and there is still a white conversion van parked in the graveled drive, snug up against the garage. The tangled confluence of resonance from the rituals Serafíne and Ian and Jae-Shin and even Alexander and perhaps even Elijah performed before leaving the chantry are still threaded about the roots of the place, and though the distinctions are fading Sera's is perhaps the brightest of the remnant notes. Liminal here, that between-feeling, that sense of becoming, of will-be, of would-have-been.
She has been here a day or perhaps too, sleeping more than you can imagine, letting her body heal and her spent self gradually return. It is who-knows-when, and there is a line of sun against the horizon which reflects like a blooded sickle against the kitchen windows. Something about the time of year, something about the mountains.
He can hear footsteps behind him, or maybe he can't. Sera is wearing fuzzy pink sock-slippers and an oversized flannel robe, left open, over a Breeders t-shirt (white cotton, black print), which is in turn short enough to show off glimpses of her underwear - little cotton hipsters, black with multi-colored polka dots and she kinda shuffles into the kitchen with a cooling mug of Darjeeling spiked with whiskey in one hand and a cooling pot of Darjeeling not-yet-spiked-with-whiskey in the other. The former she keeps in hand. The latter she sets down on a counter, watching Elijah as he works.
There are fading bruises beneath her eyes, though at this point her injuries are more theoretical than actual. Just the remainder - and the reminder - of the blood where it pooled beneath her skin. A bit of a lingering headache. A specific sort of carefulness with herself.
"Elijah." Her voice is quiet. His name is quiet. It is not without feeling. "What are you doing?"
SerafínePer + awareness-as-empathy: you okay?
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1
ElijahThere are idle gestures one makes, things one does to keep their hands busy and their mind occupied. Things that one does when they aren't really home, but they are there just enough to get through the day. He's functional, yes. He's functional enough to make sandwiches and go about his morning routine, but his mind if elsewhere. His thoughts are elsewhere, and in those quiet moments when there aren't people and sounds and sensations and he's left with that moment of solitude and self- no. No, he isn't okay.
There's a pile of sandwiches. He probably doesn't know how many he's made- truthfully, he doesn't seem to care, just until the loaf of bread is done and over with, and there's already four of them, cut into diamond shaped halves with the crust lopped off until they're just perfect little right triangles on a plate. Like he's making lunch for an army of finicky first graders and he hasn't touched a damned thing. He doesn't hear her at first. Doesn't hear her approach, but might be envious of those socks because they seemed comfortable and he longed for the day that it was socially acceptable for men to wear things that were fuzzy and comfortable because traditional masculinity insisted upon so many things.
He's dressed like he'd come in from church. Not that Elijah went to church, but sometimes he dressed nicely. Sometimes, sometimes he did because sometimes he ran out of clothes and didn't feel like doing laundry.
He didn't feel like doing a lot of things. He certainly wasn't okay, not at that juncture.
What was he doing? She asked. The last thing he ate was a salad with Grace. Only half of that. His stomach was insistent that he eat something, but his mind had other plans.
"Making sandwiches," he replied, "do you want one?"
SerafíneSera has not had a shower yet today. Elijah is making sandwiches like it is morning and perhaps it is. She does not know whether the sun is coming or going but that line is from the west so: so, the sun is going. Elijah is making something-like-breakfast-or-lunch and Sera smells all warm and feels a little bit sour, as you do when you first wake-up, hung over, and discover that the whole of the day is gone.
He is making sandwiches. Does she want one?
"Sure." Sera's voice is quiet. It feels like morning. She has already set aside the teapot she brought in and now as she crosses the kitchen she sets aside the mug too so that by the time she's close enough to reach for Elijah she has both hands with which to do so. "I was gonna make eggs, but I could eat a sandwich."
Slides her arms around him from behind, see. Drops her brow to his spine. Elijah is a solid nine inches taller than she is so when she follows that moment of communion - brow to spine - with a firm, quiet kiss, her mouth is set between his shoulder blades, her arms wrapped around his flanks.
And she must spy the sandwiches now over his shoulder because,
"You cut off all the crusts."
She smells like whiskey, Sera. Nevermind that she just got up.
ElijahThe sun is going to do what the sun damned well pleases, because the sun does what it wants and does not wait for no man or woman. It has a schedule to keep, doesn't negotiate and doesn't bargain. the sun is constant like that.
He stops his movement when he feels her lips between his shoulder blades, inhales like he wasn't expecting it, but not like it was unwelcome. no, it's as though some part of him is reminded that barriers, that separateness is bullshit, something he'd heard her scream at Sid, though he'd taken it out of context, built a world around the idea and mused over it in the moments when he'd been dancing with Hawksley or making out with someone he'd just met or staring at the ceiling while he waited to go to sleep, when sleep still terrified him and he needed something to do to please, please let tonight be different.
He cut off all the crusts.
"Do you want one with crust?" he asked. What he had done with the crust was anyone's guess, because he hadn't eaten it, but it was nowhere to be found. Odd, because it was one of his favorite parts. Odd, because he just needed an extra step. He inhaled and smelled whiskey, felt warmth. Felt reminded of something, of the vitality of the world around him. Commas, not periods.
Serafíne"Mmm." Sera hums beneath her breath, voice thoughtful. She may be considering something. There may be something solid beneath her tongue. Like a stone. And if Elijah is aware of things he may be aware of the way her arms have wrapped themselves around his torso, made bulkier by the plaid flannel robe she found who-knows-where, left cuff pushed up more than the right, showing off the the sharp angles of her ink, there. The beginnings of the crow's skull tattooed on her outer forearm. "I do want one with a crust.
"And I want it toasted, unless it is sourdough. If it's sourdough I want a different kind of bread."
Just like that. She doesn't really move, though. She doesn't really move until he seems like he wants to move, wants her to move. Wants to be given over to his own agency again. Until then she just holds him.
Why the hell not?
Elijah"Toasted in the oven or toasted from a toaster?"
Serafíne"I didn't even know you could toast in the oven. 'Cept for toaster-ovens, but that's because they're both things at the same time."
Elijah"Jenn and I don't own a toaster, we do pretty much everything in the oven," they don't own a television, either. They don't live together anymore, either either. He still talks about her like she's his housemate, though, because he did still pay for the apartment. It was, technically, still a place that he lived. If only on paper. If only, if only.
He doesn't move, though, doesn't go to pick up the loaf of bread and, instead, he just stands there with Sera's arms around his flanks and his hands move to lay on top of hers. He closes his eyes. takes in warmth and draws in a ragged breath. He doesn't want to be given over to his own agency, instead content to be held and to take long, deep, shaky breaths. A second passed.
"I was really worried for you," he admits, though it's not the least bit shameful to admit. Why should he be ashamed?
SerafíneThat makes her laugh, a bit, and they're quiet, see, in the warmth of the kitchen, with too-many sandwiches missing all their crusts piled in front of Elijah. So Sera's laughter is not vocalized, it is all hummed, less amusement than acknowledgment of something that is not quite so cynical as irony, but still somehow self-aware. Because see,
"I don't ever make my own toast," Sera confesses. "It has a dial but the dial doesn't work right. You have to wait until the scent changes or something. I never get it right."
(She doesn't know that Elijah doesn't live with Jenn anymore. Or if she does, it isn't something she remembers. Or if it is something she remembers, she does not perhaps understand that this troubles him.)
Elijah wants to be held, and so, Sera holds him, her cheek against his back. "Why were you worried for me?"
Elijah"The dial never works right," he confides, "it goes bread-bread-toastashes. And that's how all toasters work."
The mysteries of the universe, there. The truth of toasters.
There was the question of why he was worried for her. Hands stay over hers and he tries to keep his breathing steady, but it's hard. It's really hard, but he tries anyway. Perhaps, of course, because it was hard. Perhaps difficult things were worthy of being done sometimes just because they were difficult. Why was he worried for her.
"You did a lot a few days ago," he said, "and you really got hurt and… you're my friend, and I want you to be okay. I know bad things can happen, but I want you to come back from them."
SerafíneOh, she can feel that rhythm in his breathing, the hitch of it that wants to turn into something else, something wilder, and the will that keeps it under control. She is smiling, but again he cannot see the expression, at most he can feel it perhaps in the winsome lift of her cheek against his scapula. Some responsive ache in her when she feels him both tremor and resist that tremor, reach for the difficult things that might be worth doing, like breathe deeply and confess his fear.
His fears.
"I'm okay, though." Sera says - very simply and very solidly. He hasn't turned around to look at her yet, has he? That's for the best. Her fading black eyes are turning quite ugly colors. Somehow, sometimes, healing wounds look worse than the first response to the blow. There is empathy wound into her tone too, and this quiet, inexorable logic. "I'm right here. You are, too.
"You're not worried anymore, are you?"
ElijahShe's okay, though. He can't see her face, so he doesn't have the ammunition to not believe her, but he can't argue with her logic. She's there. He's here. They're both present and alive and she wonders, asks, if he's worried now.
If he's not worried then why isn't he eating? He's made a pile of sandwiches and he hasn't moved just yet but he's hungry, feels hungry, knows he's hungry, but can't bring himself to actually eat because the texture just doesn't settle well with him. She asks if he's worried anymore, and he doesn't move. Stillness doesn't suit him.
"I'm worried about different things… I talked to Kalen about Victoria, about… whatever's going to happen to her now. I want to believe that… that the fact that she's dead and gone is actually going to help her, that she can start over now," but, because there's a but in his voice. Things he wants to believe with conviction but doesn't.
"I've never seen anybody die before," he admits. And he actually does sound ashamed of that.
ElijahShe's okay, though. He can't see her face, so he doesn't have the ammunition to not believe her, but he can't argue with her logic. She's there. He's here. They're both present and alive and she wonders, asks, if he's worried now.
If he's not worried then why isn't he eating? He's made a pile of sandwiches and he hasn't moved just yet but he's hungry, feels hungry, knows he's hungry, but can't bring himself to actually eat because the texture just doesn't settle well with him. She asks if he's worried anymore, and he doesn't move. Stillness doesn't suit him.
"I'm worried about different things… I talked to Kalen about Victoria, about… whatever's going to happen to her now. I want to believe that… that the fact that she's dead and gone is actually going to help her, that she can start over now," but, because there's a but in his voice. Things he wants to believe with conviction but doesn't.
"I've never seen anybody die before," he admits. And he actually does sound ashamed of that.
Serafíne"Come on," Elijah is still. Sera moves first. Breaks the spell of contact but only long enough to pull back and turn Elijah around and redirect him from the countertop where he is making: sandwich after sandwich after sandwich. The fading bruises on her face might look worse now than they did the last time he saw her, but she's moving normally, not the contracted, painful shuffle she managed up the stairs and out of Victoria's house.
Reality is painful.
It is also: passing.
"Let's go sit. I'm too tired to keep standing up and we don't really need any more sandwiches."
ElijahThat's the thing with now. Now being everything, now being what we consider the past and now being the future and all of it being the present when you really look at it. Moments are fleeting. One can be present in them, but inevitably that time does pass and the focus will shift to a different now, a now where there aren't dead bodies or blood and Sera's face isn't bruised up, but she's healing. His thoughts move quicksilver fast, to the point of dizzying. To the point where he can't stay on one thing for too long lest he dwell.
He turned around; Sera saved a load of bread from massacre and a death of slow and inevitable withering because despite the surprising number of sandwiches there, he probably wasn't actually going to eat any of them.
"I owe you something with crusts," he says, perhaps protests, but she says they are going to go sit down. He offers an arm, because she said she was tired. She might be moving normally but the bruises make him wince. Make him nostalgic- a reminder for when he was young and clueless and had no idea that it was difficult as fuck to give yourself a black eye by running into a door but he'd bought it anyway because-
We digress.
SerafíneWell, Sera pays precisely no attention to Elijah's protest that he owes her a sandwich with crusts. She is hungry but she also doesn't fucking care if she gets a sandwich with crusts or a sandwich without or no goddamned sandwich at all. She's used to hunger: good hunger, see. Clean hunger. Want, bright and driving and powerful and it isn't something that she will allow to be tainted by a woman who was mad for power and hungry enough to kill.
And he offers her his arm and she takes it because she is a Sera and she is always taking someone's arm and she notices the wince, she has to notice it. She doesn't reassure him that it is nothing because it isn't nothing. It still aches and yesterday it shredded her but there is so much that she is learning that she can bear.
So, she tucks herself against Elijah's flank and together they head back to her room. Sera in her t-shirt and underwear and pink fuzzy sock-slippers and Elijah in his usual finery. Climb the steps to the space she has claimed for the few days she needs to recover, to recall herself to herself. The bed is still unmade, a tangle of sheets and the comforter sort of piled/nested in the middle and the room smelling entirely of Sera. A little bit like sex, but only a little. She masterbated when she awoke this morning, to a small, shuddering climax, more for comfort than anything else.
And maybe Elijah sits and Sera crawls across him to lean against the headboard and whatever is happening here there is this: he's not holding her. She's holding him.
"Are you really worried about Victoria?"
ElijahHe'd never actually been concerned about one's place in traditional masculinity, things that people deign to be weaknesses. Showing that you had emotions, showing that you felt something, being afraid- openly afraid of something. He'd not found strength in the denial of truth, because the truth always came back. It was persistent like that. It was insistent like that, sure of itself and sure of its place in the world, because there was always a place for the truth. Sera doesn't tell him that this is nothing, that what happened was nothing because it wasn't nothing. H knows nothing, or Nothing with a capital N. Is aware of it in ways he shouldn't be aware of things, and nowadays he dreams of nothing, lowercase N instead of the capitalized one. He isn't afraid of his dreams anymore, not that they do not have the capacity to be terrible but there came an acceptance.
They were what they were.
He sits with his back free and open, with his legs over the side of the bed and his knees occasionally brushing the night stand. He doesn't know her room at her house is covered in art- low art, high art, middling art, all kinds of art. In truth, he'd never been to her room there. Would have probably been fascinated by the little things there and fallen asleep on the bed marveling at how the sheets felt because he'd been turned on to a world of texture. The room smells like her, this one does, and he likes that. She has a way of making a place her own, even if she was there just for a moment.
Was he really worried about Victoria?
"Yeah," he said, he nods, "I guess… in a way I'm worried about her. And I'm… I'm kinda… I don't know," he doesn't say fucked up but he wants to, it lingers in his tone, "when people die, and they stick around, it's because they have unfinished business, and the place they stay is fucking horrible, but once it's done it's done. You move on."
Then, to the heart of the matter. He exhales a shuddering breath, "Sh did some fucked up things, but I didn't think she was hopeless."
SerafíneSera listens. God she listens. And Elijah can sit at the edge of the bed or curl up with his head on her lap. She just, drapes an arm over the breadth of the young man's shoulders and listens in a way that is serious and strange and thoughtful without being measured, that is physical rather than intellectual, that lives in her body and her blood and her skin as much as it ever does in her mind.
"How do you know what happens to people when they die?"
ElijahEventually, he does lay back, put his head in her lap because it feels nice and he likes looking up at her and he likes the closeness and he likes the fact that there is a person there. He takes sensation because he needs it, because he does live in his head sometimes, thinking simultaneously too much and not enough about the right things. It gets him into trouble.
"Because I hear them," he told her.
SerafíneWell,
Elijah lays back and settles his head in his lap and there is Sera, with her sort-of-still-kinda blackened eyes and her sleep-tangled hair and her Breeders t-shirt and her fine, calloused fingers smoothing themselves over his brow, his temples, finding their way into his hair.
He tells her that he hears the dead and she absorbs that, maybe. Doesn't really think about what it is or what it means. She doesn't think about them at all: people who have gone, except that they are: gone.
But she's searching his face, her own rather tender.
"Do you want to know what I think?"
ElijahDoes he want to know what she thinks?
He looks up at her, from that different angle and he considers closing his eyes, close close his eyes because he is instinctive sometimes. When one is comfortable the mind drifts, the body drifts, insists that one should rest even though he doesn't need to rest. He's comfortable, and maybe he does think about it.
It troubles him. His brows were knit for a second, jaw set before he'd relaxed, but does he want to know what she thinks?
"Of course," he tells her.
Serafíne"Victoria made her choices. She always had autonomy in this, you know? Nothing was riding her. No one forced her to become a person who tore other people apart - who enslaved others in order to use them to tear other people apart.
"If she was serious about changing that; and changing the life she lived, and finding a way to atone for that, then I might worry about her. The darkness of the path she walks. The way that guilt, the legacy of pain and loss might wear on her, and how easy it would be for her to fall.
"But that's not the choice she made. I don't - "
This brief frown, cresting the edge of her expression.
"I'm not happy that she's dead. But I'm happy that she's not going to lure more young men into darkness, that she's not going to destroy more lives in her quest for whatever the fuck she was looking for.
"I worry about people - who don't have choices, or who don't know that they can make them, or who think that they are bound by all the darkness in their past to only darkness in the future, or who cannot remember to look for the paths that are open to them, rather than the ones that are closed.
"So I hope she finds another path, and a better path, but I'm not worried about her. That's what I think."
Elijah
He looked up at her from his current position, took his words in for what it was and inhaled slow and deep and perhaps he could find comfort in these sorts of things. Perhaps he could find solace in her wisdom because one couldn't argue with the fact that Serafíne had a point.
"That's… that I am worried about, I guess… it makes more sense to worry about the people who can't help themselves- people who don't have choices," he sighed, "it's easy to feel like you don't have any options."
It was a strange, bitter thought. It was a strange, pained thought. It was something that passed through his mind.
"There's… a lot more people out there like that."
Serafíne
"It's easy to feel a lot of things," murmurs Sera, wry. Her face is all enshadowed and it only makes the bruises on her face darker, the evidence of her exhaustion more prominent. There is something so sharp and fine about her, seen from below, her blond hair haloed by the warm glow of the bedside table, her fingertips stippled through his hair. And beneath the wryness she means that and she seems both here and very very far away, and there's nothing much more to say, is there. Elijah was worried about Victoria. Perhaps he is still worried about Victoria, about what her soul will encounter on the other side of the veil.
Maybe he will always be worried about her.
It is, as Sera says, easy to feel a lot of things.
All too often, she herself feels everything.
And she's aching tonight, and that ache is both old and young, and it beats inside her body with each downstroke of the pulse visible in her throat. But that's okay.
She leans back against the headboard, still sitting up, Elijah's head in her lap, her fingers threaded through his hair. Hums some threaded version of a song he can hear but only just, beneath her breath, under her skin, both within and without, until Elijah falls asleep.
There's no magic in it.
Or perhaps there is.
When morning comes around again, she's gone.
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