Couch Forts

Elijah

There is a front room.

There is a front room with furniture and a dining room with furniture and an upstairs that has beds and pillows. He came with a plan. He had a plan and it was through the front door with him. Knocks three times, bundled up because, regardless of the weather, driving a motorcycle in February is freezing and in he came with a backpack and a dream.

Knockknockknock

"Hi it's me I'm coming in don't mind-"

The backpack is set by the front door witht he clunk of glass bottles and the rustle of free floating plastic.

Serafíne

There's an old Ford Econoline van in the driveway of the chantry late Sunday, well into Monday too, turning 'round toward Tuesday. Bright moon in the sky that seems to be setting just before dawn. This sense of work in the air. Rejuvenating, growing near the node and something else - something framed, something that feels like a space outside of definitions, between modes. Like thresholds and doorways. Possibilities.

Elijah

There is a feeling in the air and it makes him pause, makes him breathe in deep because he feels like there is something going on. Something that was potential and possibilities, something that hadn't been converted to the kinetic and he thinks about how important it is that potential is coming to fruition on a full moon. He never thought himself the type who would think about these kinds of things. Well, technically it wasn't a full moon anymore, but full enough that it bore mention. Full enough to him that it brought his eyes to the sky.

It was always bright on the other side. Waxes and wanes and disappears, but it catches his attention none the less. That wasn't the point, though. The point was this: there was work being done here.

So, there was that feeling, and he went towards the node, towards the back of the house and out the door, to investigate.

Like he needed to investigate much.

Serafíne

"Hey." Dan in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up his forearms. Something on the stove. Something in the oven. Radiant warmth in the air and he's wearing an apron and the apron has a ruffle around its frame. The tall man smirks through his beard at Elijah because he knows he's wearing a ruffled apron. Picks up a bottle of beer from the counter and takes a swig.

"I think Sera's down in the living room. Food should be ready, soon, if you're hungry. Grab yourself a beer?"

Elijah

Investigation yielded results quickly, because no sooner than hi senses went ooooh, magic, he found himself meandering towards the kitchen and there was Dan. Dan making food.

His curiosities answered, but it turns out his sense of direction was off. He grinned, "food sounds fantastic." Because this was Elijah. He had yet to ever turn down anything that Dan cooked. He headed to the fridge to grab a beer, grabbed a bottle he knew he could open with a flimsy belt buckle, and called it good.

"I brought brownies," he said, "the original plan was to build a couch fort, but since there's people I might not."

He probably will, though.

Serafíne

That has Dan breathing out a laugh beneath his breath. Swallowing some of it, shedding the rest. The room smells like baking bread and vegetable soup: that peculiarly wintry combination that steams up the windows and fills the place with a good root smell.

"You could probably convince Sera to huddle with you beneath a couchfort. I mean, she's pretty exhausted? So you could probably talk her into becoming a nun or putting on a pair of footed pajamas or - "

Wry, Dan shoes Elijah onward once Elijah has retrieved his beer.

--

Downstairs, Elijah will find Sera curled up on the couch, a blanket over her spare body. Her hair's a mess and she looks: wan. Absolutely spent. But she kinda stirs when his footsteps sound on the stairs and gives him a lazy wave over, yawning a bit midgesture.

Elijah

A beat.

"Think she'd go for footie pajamas?"

Now he's thinking about it, though, and with a grin he headed off to the living room, shooed away to the living room with him.

--

Downstairs, down and downward into the cozy inner sanctum of the house, tehre was a Sera. An absolutely spent Sera, and there was Elijah windswept but ultimately energized with a beer in hand. He sauntered over, planted a kiss on the top of her head if she'd let him- wouldn't if she wouldn't- and he smiled.

"Wanna hang out in a couch fort?"

Serafíne

'Course Sera allows Elijah to kiss her on the crown of her head. If there's something in the world that she would not allow him - well - he hasn't found it yet.

So he kisses the crown of her head and she tips her head back and watches him as he circles the couch and breathes out a kind of laugh. Hooks a spare shoulder into a narrow little shrug.

"Sure. What the fuck's a couch fort?"

Elijah

"It's like a little tent-palace-thing that you make with household furniture crap- like pillows and blankets and generally things that you actually want to lay on."

Serafíne

"Do I hafta do anything or can you build it all around me?"

Elijah

He thinks about this for a minute, surveys the furniture nearby, before nodding, "nah, you shouldn't have to move, but if you do? It'll be, like, two feet of moving. Tops."

Serafíne

"Mmm." The creature hums, beneath her breath, or maybe above it as she considers her options and gazes up through her lashes at the young mage hovering over her. It is an effort to move or think or to be anything but where she is, feeling as she does. Sometimes when she's like this she just cries for no goddamned reason. Throws back six shots like nothing. Does - well -

- her Will is spent.

Sera isn't crying now. She seems thinner, somehow, as if she might manage someday to spread herself to insubstantiality, and she's a little bit tipsy but hasn't got the energy to head upstairs to grab herself another drink, and the wards are they, everywhere, worked, and she can feel the power of it. Makes her feel weird: proudweird but weird, like who knew she'd ever become an adult, and here she is.

Incising the world.

Incising the world and rolling off the couch: literally rolling off of it. Her blanket tangled around her legs and her ass (she's wearing boxers and a t-shirt, no bra but she's not well-endowed so who can really tell) lands solidly on the carpet between the coffee table and the couch.

"There. Easier if I'm on the ground? Make it big enough that I can lay down. I'm fucking tired."

Elijah

"Much easier," he says. She rolls off the couch though and he half snorts, half laughs, because he can't help it because... well.. for some reason it's funny to him. The whole motion of rolling off the couch so strangely familiar that he can't quite put a finger on it.

But there they are, and there was to be a couch fort. It starts, of course, with chaos.

That's how all things start with Elijah, like feeling like there is a goddamned disaster, and soon enough the young man made his way to the nearest piece of furniture with cushions and they are tossed, haphazardly, into a pile. They make heavy-yet-sort noises. Thunk. wump-something like that. They aren't a perfect stack. He doesn't care.

so he starts to make a pile of cushions, a floor for laying on, so to speak. Makeshift lounging spaces, but also? It was time to rearrange furniture. To push and pull and make a perimeter around the absolutely exhausted cultist-

"You really busted ass," he said. He could tell, but continues with his building.

- LIke this was a tiny exhibit. Behold Serafine in her natural habitat. We digress. Once the perimeter was set, there would need to be blankets. Definitely, definitely blankets.

Serafíne

Elijah tells her that she really busted ass, and Sera makes another one of those strange little noises, back of the throat thing, very much beneath and under her skin. Having rolled she now decides to sit up, legs crossed, the blanket falling in a woven drift around her waist.

"Someone had to." Okay, now she's a little bit teary eyed. Because ow: tired. Because ow: so many other things. But it's passing, it's passing. Everything hurts, sometimes, and she's not afraid of pain. "It's just weird that that someone was me."

Oh, she plants her feet on the floor and bends her knees and brings them up, arms around her calves, chin on her right patella, watching Elijah as he works.

"You did this alot when you were a kid?"

Elijah

"Not as much when we moved, but for awhile yeah. I kind of had free reign of the house so long as I wasn't loud or drawing on the walls," he says.

"Be right back."

It was up the stairs with him, though. Up and up and ugh so many stairs. He had to acquire sheets and blankets and such things.

About five minutes later, he does come back with sufficient building materials. Well, more than sufficient building materials, but it likely meant that Elijah was going to have to clean up a lot before he went home tonight. Or tomorrow. Or whatever. He didn't seem to care, it was off to erecting the actual structure with spare bedsheets.

"We didn't have alot of people over. Dad was running a start up so we didn't live somewhere fantastic in New Orleans. It was okay, but mostly just full of old people."

Serafíne

By the time Elijah returns with his extra building material, Dan has come downstairs with dinner. Or breakfast. Or lunch: whatever the house is. This loaf of fresh-baked and braided bread with sandwich meats and cheeses and some spinach and olives baked right into the center, the braided top golden brown and dusted with black sesame seeds. The sandwich-loaf have been sliced into slices, each one a perfect little baked sandwich the size of a slice of bread.

There are some chips and baby carrots and another bottle for Sera, but he it is all very low-key. He perches on the edge of an armchair near where she sits, a slice of sandwich in hand, the frilly apron still tied round his body, eating. Sera has two pieces of sandwich and a handful of carrots and some chips on the plate in front of her but hasn't eaten yet.

They're chatting when he comes back down. Dan's saying - "I think it's because when you are a kid its fun to create a space that is small and enclosed and belongs to you. Cozy and maybe kinda mysterious. Creates possibility, too."

Sera doesn't touch much of her meal. Her body is kinda wracked and she doesn't feel like eating, but that doesn't seem to have depressed her appetite for alcohol. She asks a little bit about New Orleans and then kinda curls up with her head on the edge of the couch and watches them work. Maybe she falls asleep, a bit. Wakes up later when the structure is finished and Elijah crawls inside.

Clean up? Okay, yes. But: later.

Now there's just a fort.