[How awake are we?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (3, 4, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Kalen Holliday[And how distracted by Resonance are we?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )
SerafíneAn old Ford Econoline van in the driveway, a half-empty bottle of whiskey on the kitchen counter next to a cooling pot of tea covered in a hand-crocheted tea cozy. There's some irony there. In fact the word IRONY has been crocheted into the netting, in a subtle tone on tone effect. Fragrant, the tea. Someone has fished the tea ball out of the water after it was brewed, to keep it from bitterness. It sits in its own little puddle in the stainless steel sink.
The tailings from another kind of tea left behind in a pot on the stove, right, recently made. The pot is still warm, even hot to the touch, but the brew has been poured out into something else and all that is left in the pot on the stove are the soggy shrooms in a strainer and a bit of the loose tea used to flavor the mix so that it doesn't taste like, well, boiled mushroom water.
--
She's outside, Sera is. Kalen can feel her resonance from a half-mile away. He can't feel Dan's presence because Dan doesn't leave those telltale stains on the supernatural senses but look: tea made. Both kinds, properly. Van in the driveway. Where does she go that the consor fails to follow? Hell, she doesn't drive (that is so she can drink) so he's pretty necessary to her getting here.
Downstairs, though. Not out back where the hotspring steams even in the midst of winter: but downstairs, where the lower level living room opens onto the fields framing the house. Just outside. The clouds are breaking up and a huge moon bathes everything in this broken, silvery light. The snow that fell yesterday is already melting. Tomorrow it'll be sixty degrees.
Kalen HollidayKalen does step inside after he arrives. He does not start water for more coffee or more tea, but he does fill a kettle and set it on the stove. Ready. Serafine has no fear of the cold, though he expects Dan is probably already on that, and Kalen himself is not on the whole fond of the cold. It is growing on him, with Danny's love for snow angels and Alexander's Resonance, but he still is not overly fond of it. But, with minimal preparations made, Kalen heads outside to find Serafine. Or Serafine and Dan. However that happens.
As usual, he seems like he's dressed for weather that's colder, at least by Denver standards, but even so he still can't get into this hats thing. Long heavy coats and scarves, yes. Still not hats. His coat tonight is a simple charcoal grey wool, and it seems unremarkable enough until you touch it and find that it is all clean lines and cashmere. Of course it is. Beyond that, it's dark grey jeans and boots. The only thing in the whole outfit with any real color tonight is his scarf, which is grey with a purplish sheen.
SerafíneSera does not particularly love the cold. It's just that she will not let it interfere with her goddamned fashion sense. So: right. That's how Kalen finds them, Dan and Sera - on the front patio framing the house, framing the view of the undulating fields surrounding the property, which roll away in a pastoral landscape remote enough that it almost feels untouched. Denver is aglow beyond the horizon, though, and even out here sometimes the winding note of distant headlights flares through the gloom.
She's wearing something that leaves her legs mostly-bare as she usually does, Sera, and Kalen passed by her discarded leather jacket somewhere in the vicinity of the dining room. It smells like marijuana and clove cigarettes and this subtle, expensive French parfum that one would never really associated with her except: of course. Of course.
Absent the leather jacket her outer wear has been augmented by a chenille throw stolen from the living room, piled around her shoulders. This subtle, sage-green glow. She is drinking something - sipping something - from a stainless steel travel mug and turns around or is steered in that direction by one of Dan's arms when the glass sliders skim open and Kalen walks out, dressed for the weather, dressed for much worse weather, in grays and blacks and the sheen of that scarf alive in the moonlight.
"Hey." A sharp breath out. This shimmering smile tossed his way. A few sips in and the tea is already starting to hammer her senses. The moorings of reality slip further from her reach but: Kalen, she knows Kalen. She reaches for the scarf, which seems alive to her in the moonlight. Runs her thumb and forefinger over the nap, admiring the stream of light.
"I'm gonna fix the wards." A bit - hmm. Giddy? Laughter in her breath as she exhales, not quite able to let go of his scarf. "I've never done this before."
Kalen HollidayKalen smiles a little, watches her reach out and stays still so that she can examine his scarf. It, like the coat, is very soft, but a little more silky. The hint of shimmering purple makes his eyes more apparently green. Or perhaps it the reflection of laughter. Or her tea.
Dan gets a little nod while Sera investigates the play of light on his scarf, a very quick smile. Perhaps one day, they will speak. But, as it always does, his attention slides back to Serafine. Very little pulls his attention away from her for long, and Dan, unlike Alexander, doesn't pull at Kalen with an equal gravity.
"That's often the most interesting time," Kalen says. "I...know very little about warding. I could, perhaps, make the windows more bulletproof, but most of what I can do isn't terribly helpful in that regard."
Serafíne"I know fuck-all about it," Sera is telling him, and he allows her to examine his scarf and she just keeps playing with it. She was tucked up against Dan when Kalen emerged from the chantry house proper but sort of unspooled herself from his arms to turn to greet Kalen and has not quiet returned. The chenille blanket trails haphazardly off her narrow frame, sliding now that she is not holding it closed with her free hand, "I mean I read some shit in the books in there and I've been - "
An open look, an open mind, backward, lilting, a glance at the sky, " - sliding around the idea for a while, just letting it fit inside me, and I remember Jim did it - I mean the way he did it, when we were on the run. I went back to see the hotel room but I think the wards he did then are faded now. The kids are still next door, though."
Sera does not understand how... disjointed her sentences sound. The run-on ideas, the flight of circumstance, and she still hasn't let go of the scarf. "I'm gonna keep people out though. Keep their heads out. I'm gonna make it kind of invisible to those who come looking. Kind of like, move on, move on, nothing to see here. I'm just not really sure how to start, you? Except with the 'shrooms. I mean, that part I have fucking down. You wanna walk with me? I thought I'd go down to the bottom of the field and - fuck. Get started."
Kalen HollidayKalen smiles a little wider and offers her an arm. It remains, perhaps, an outwardly formal gesture. There is nothing stiff or hesitant in the offer though. He considers these offers to Serafine no more formal than when he reaches out to hug her, for all he does that unbidden more rarely.
"Of course I'll walk with you." He watches her, and there is something about that look that is measuring. The composition of her sentences seems fine to him, but Kalen is rather used to being in the company of people in alternate states of consciousness. He's spent some time there too, but most of that is not recent. But the world still fragments for him sometimes, into probabilities and possibilities. And he remembers nights where truths fractured into light and then into colors and then-
No. Now.
"Tell me about what Jim did?"
SerafíneWell. Kalen offers her an arm and Sera takes it and tucks herself against his side. Dan makes a quiet noise that sounds like a chuckle and gives her over Kalen's hands for the moment, though there's a moment's hesitation before he heads back inside. Then he delays Kalen with a quiet - "Hey," and tells him, quietly, that that shit Sera is drinking is going to hit her hard in about ten, fifteen minutes. This casting might take her a long time. Might take her all night and all day. If Kalen needs to split, he should let Dan know - let Dan know that he's going and know where he's left Sera. That quiet compact is finalized by a clap on Kalen's shoulder with an open hand, and then Dan does leave them and Sera (who is kinda rolling her eyes and also watching Dan, all winsome and aware) takes another sip from her mushroom tea and they start walking through the field, the dead grasses rustling with every step, the damp, dark earth - made sucking, muddy, treacherous by pockets of still-melting snow - squelching beneath their feet.
Good thing she's wearing her shit-kickers. Kalen, though, might need new shoes after this unexpected hike.
"Jim - did you ever meet him? Jim like, built the wards he mage by kind of framing them with his ritual. He wanted the cops and anyone who might be looking for us to be empty - be hungry - be wanton, to go looking for something that might fill that up instead of seeing us. So he started purging himself, like he was throwing up to frame that, to empty himself out. I mean it's weird.
"Time's easy for me but space. I keep reminding myself that it's just another fucking illusion and that everything is here and everything is now, but then I think about the sky full of stars and it all seems so vast and piercing I can't fucking conceptualize a way that they could be anything but scattered. But then I start walking, like now, just opening up my mind, and my senses feel stippled with place. Does that make any fucking sense? Like the way light comes in through the shadows in a room, scattered and pointilist, interrupted but still - shining. It makes me shiver, how clear it all is. How close. It makes my head tingle."
And shiver she does. Kalen can feel the slow coil of subtle magic lifting through her: something sensory, no more, this initial awareness of the field, the wood beyond. The house. It's shape against the mountains and the sky.
SerafíneCorrespondence 1. Sensory stuff! Dif 4 -1 (node proximity.)
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (3, 3, 10) ( success x 3 )
Kalen HollidayKalen smiles a little again when Dan starts giving him instructions. And he listens, because he knows only very basically what went into that tea. Knows nothing at all about how much Serafine has had or how much she normally has or how she normally reacts. His expression does not change when Dan reaches out to his shoulder, although Kalen's eyes track the movement. There are only so many people who move unmonitored into Kalen's space. There is a different breath, a slower inhale and exhale, softer. The set of his shoulders eases a little. And then he nods to Dan.
"I met Jim only once. He seemed...." He seemed like someone Kalen wanted to know, though he never had. "He seemed warm. But I only ever saw him at that one chantry meeting." He glances only occasionally at the ground. Mud washes out, washes off. And if it is stubborn enough there are more boots and more pants.
Kalen takes another breath as he considers her observations on space and time and stars. This one is less communion with her, and more like he could breathe in some universal truths, taste them and translate them into words. "It could be like light," he says. "All the stars seem scattered, maybe, but their light is here, in this place, with you." He says it as though all of the stars are there just for her, shining just for her. "Maybe you don't need everything in one place so much as you need the point at which it converges. The places where all the echoes interweave and you can touch them all. That you feel it all here."
He smiles a little. "But I don't...space. Only time and fate. They seem like they might not be so different, though."
Serafíne"I miss Jim," Sera admits quietly. There is a supple thread of ache there - something that seems somehow both reserved and unstinting. "He was - "
Here she stops, pauses. Considers, and hums, beneath her breath. "I think there was a time when he was pretty violent. I never got the whole story but he knew a helluva lot of people that a pacifist stoner yoga instructor might never've met. He was in prison for a while and he was so fucking smart, man. He knew all this shit. Like, a lot like that little guy from fucking Star Wars. You know? The green one.
"With the whiskers and shit. Except the thing about movies and little green yoga instructors is that there's this big lie that they don't have their own shit, you know? And everyone else just thinks that they're so fucking amazing, zen and brilliant, calm and patient and loving - which doesn't mean they can't get hurt. Like when Jim and Sid had problems, Jim just fell the fuck apart.
"I dunno. He just hurt so much. He's just retreat into this pit of depression. Just - "
This story might not be the best way to start a trip. They're picking their way through the dead, dry grass in the field facing the chantry. She is still - sipping at her tea, Sera. The moon in the sky and the stars surrounding it, bright, too-bright and when she closes her eyes and thinks about their light as both singular and universal, each one feels like a pinprick against her skin.
It makes her shiver. Almost as much as the memory of Jim's despair.
"After Sid and Jim broke up, he told me that he'd always felt like he was moving. You know? Growing - like toward enlightenment and shit. I mean, shit I never think about. But after all that he told me he just felt like he was stuck. Like he wasn't moving. Like he didn't think he could - just that he was mired, and he'd lost that and he'd lost -
"Fuck. I didn't see him much again, after that. Still pay the rent on his motel room, though. Just in case he comes back and needs a place to crash."
She's quiet for a little while longer. There's probably not much to say to that and Sera might be crying, quietly, thoroughly, quite suddenly though perhaps not. surprisingly. As they reach the lower border of the field, she kinda leans into Kalen. Fewer tears, now, though they are still kinda leaking from the corners of her eyes.
"You know, usually when I do magic, I am losing myself in the world?" She's thinking about Jim. She's also thinking about stars and points of convergence, echoes and - "Maybe I also like, can let the world loose inside me. Pull it in? Open up to it in a different way. Maybe that's what I need to do.
"To make it real. You know?"
Kalen Holliday"I only saw Sid after," Kalen says softly. And Sid was hurt. And then, not long after she curled up and cried on him, Sid had hurt him. He doesn't tell Serafine about that, though that is more about timing than anything. She wants to open herself to the world and that...he does not think she would refuse to open herself to the world and slice herself to ribbons against all its sharp edges. But he doesn't need to talk about Sid. He came home to his cabal, and his pseudoapprentice and his actual apprentice and Serafine. Because Ian dragged him for awhile until he would move. Mired. Mired is a good word for a place that he was.
He does not tell her not to cry. He does not comment on her crying. There is no sense of tension about it, and he drops his head for a second to rub his cheek against her shoulder. But there is no move to enfold her or to stop their walking.
"The woman who first taught me magic," he says, and his voice is still soft, but now with more warmth than sorrow, "Found it to be like that. And I do too, but I don't know if I would if she hadn't found me first. Every once in awhile, you remind me of her. She opens herself up to the world by breathing it in." And Kalen, too, Works with breath, Serafine has seen that. "Sometimes in the company of other things, but more than anything she connects to the world by breathing it in."
SerafíneForces 1: See sound. Difficulty 4 +1 (first time she's used Forces, doesn't know she has it) -1 (near a node)
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )
SerafíneSera glances at Kalen's profile. Sometimes she is so open to the world that she can vibe off the smallest details of a glance. That she sees things and knows things she has no right to see or know. Tonight is different. The hallucinogen she is ingesting is powerful, and already the edges of her vision are starting to smear and sing with strange tracers of light.
Her mouth is closed. Her face shining with the tracks of her mostly silent tears.
Then she glances away. Thoughtful. The world singing around her.
"That seems so intimate," she remarks, with a sort of spare wonder. "More intimate than anything I do, really. Kind of - raw you know?"
But Sera can also feel - somehow, immediately - just how it would work.
She breathes in again, abruptly, this deep and cutting breath just then
(...)
and, oh, makes this noise, as if someone had just pulled the world apart and put it back together inside of her.
Now she's seeing more than tracers: she sees the words as they leave her mouth in these widening waves. It is lovely, the way they roll over the sweep of the starlight.
"I don't - " Pause, and something about the pause feel generative, important, even as her senses start to do whatever the fuck it is they are doing to her right now. "I don't really remember learning magic, you know? It was always just what I did. What was in me. It's weird."
Kalen Holliday[Do you notice why Sera sees sounds?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )
Kalen Holliday"It is. I can't imagine magic being anything but intimate. It's...like something you do with your soul. It's pretty much the most intimate thing I've ever experienced. On some level you have to reach out and change the world with something that is so intrinsically part of yourself that the edges of what is its and what is yours blur. And some people command it or force it, but...I can't imagine taking something so beautiful and trying to cage it.
"I've always just let it have me." Who let you into the Order again, Holliday? He watches Serafine's eyes, tastes little bursts of magic that spark and flare.
"Almost none of us really experience magic the same way. There are commonalities, more between some of us than others, but I don't think that for any of us it is the same. That's part of what I love. Finding the places our perceptions overlap and the places they diverge and what points of confluence there are."
SerafíneNow it is Sera's turn to tip her head to the side. She rests her temple, briefly, on Kalen's shoulder. Feels the bony curve cushioned by the wrapping bulk of his fine winter coat. Watches the way the words spill from his mouth in waves. Turns her head and inhales Kalen's scent filtered through wool, smiling, soft and slow. Just hanging there for the moment.
Then she pulls back.
They've come to the edge of the lower field, encircled by an old fence outside of which is a small, scrubby copse of woods that shields the chantry and its property from any and all public roads.
"I want to go over," Sera tells him. "I want to start in the woods."
So she drinks more of her tea and it really is almost gone and then she hands him the mug and starts to climb over the fence. Maybe he helps her. The fence is low and easy to clamber over, though Sera's task is complicated by her altered consciousness.
Her blanket drags on the fence posts once she has cleared it, and then she reaches over to take her tea, and to offer Kalen a hand if he wants one to join her.
She's thinking about what he said, though, I've always just let it have me, the whole time.
"Do you mean that, Kalen? That you've always just let magic have you?"
Kalen HollidayKalen does assist her, though that assistance involves mostly holding her tea and disentangling the blanket from the rough edges of the fence. His fingertips trace over a place where a few threads remain after the blanket if freed, rough edges and soft threads and that is for a second the universe. Thoughts caught and fates entangled.
He comes across the fence after a second of his attention being oddly captivated by thread. Five years ago it would have been graceful. A year ago he could barely have done it at all. Now there is little enough impressive about it, just functional.
"Yeah. I have intentions...? Maybe more like prayers. But I don't...I never saw it as control so much as communion. The world is so...indescribably gorgeous and complex. I really see it, when I Work. I'm part of it. I mean, I always am, but I really feel it then." He frowns, because what Kalen really experiences with magic is difficult to explain. "Things sort of...the essences of them or the truth of them...it's very hard to describe.
"But magic never seemed so much a thing that we do as a thing that we are for me. It saved me, when I Awakened. Not just from a vampire but from myself. It's how I met Kharisma and Jack and how I came to the Order and those things are the things that made me real. At least as you know me."
SerafíneThey are in the woods now. The ground is rougher, these little scrub oaks are much taller when they stand in their shadows. Cutting past them: a narrow ditch that turns into a small stream when the snows melt in the spring, and anytime a gullywasher catches the eastern face of the Rockies unexpectedly in the summer or fall.
Just now it is choked with nothing more than pine needles and leaves.
"This is going to sound really fucking weird, Kalen, coming from me." The way she feels the world. Even what she's doing right now. The shrooms that enable her Work.
"But I think sometimes you need to do more than just let magic have you, you know? You need to take it instead. Write yourself into the world instead of just giving yourself over to it. Is that a fucked up think for me to say?"
--
They needn't walk far. Somewhere in the copse of trees, Sera finds a clearing. And somewhere in the clearing, she shrugs off the blanket and spreads it beneath the limbs of one of the larger trees. The ground's muddy, damp. It hardly matters to her. Maybe that's why she brought the blanket. Without it, of course, she's just wearing her stupid t-shirt and cut-off jeans and fishnets, but at the moment, she also doesn't seem to feel the cold.
Kalen Holliday"Some of it is just how I've always done this. I reach out and brush against something immense and sublime and everything dissolves for a few seconds into something...." He searches for a word in a language she can understand. "Pure. Holy."
There is a pause. "I know people who want to master their gifts, want to shape them into what they want them to be. They are not, all of them, terrible. But I have seen what becomes of us when we twist what are into an abomination. It is done by inches and degrees.
"There may be a day when I know myself well enough to judge where the edges are. But so far I have never needed to command. I just reach out and there is a moment where...it is transcendent. And that is where magic happens for me, from that place. I don't doubt that I could command. I just don't.
"But I understand why you would think that I should. And it is not a fucked up thing to say."
Serafíne"That's not what I mean, really." It is so hard for her to stay clear, right now. The edges of her perception are starting to be torn away, and she can feel her heart beating faster in her chest If she allows herself to just feel it, she might believe that it could break her ribs, shatter her sternum. Strange how our bodies rule us. And she feels a bit like a galaxy though how the hell does she know that word, how can she begin to imagine what a galaxy feels, all those arms, all that light, and just what she is, a bit staggered by her perceptions, struggling to pull back together all the pieces that make up herself. The blanket spread out and she no longer really feels the cold. Finishes the remainder of the mushroom tea and isn't quite sure what to do next.
How the fuck do you start?
She has a moment of remarkable dis-orientation
And then: Kalen. Kalen standing there steady and strange in his own way. Oh,
"I mean, I think sometimes you just let things happen to you. You know? Instead of being present for them. Instead of acting. When you have space to think, you get lost in it. That's what I meant. Though fuck if I know if I'm right."
Kalen HollidayKalen laughs, and there is something sad in it, maybe. "That is true. But that's a different thing really. I can't help but be engaged with magic. I think it is less true than when I first came to Denver, that paralysis thing that I do. But it will likely still take a bit longer to break away from that more fully." He notices that Serafine has her blanket outstretched, but he doesn't try to correct that, at least not yet.
"Sometimes I feel alarmingly muffled. Like I'm caught in a chrysalis. Everything about me has always been mutable. When this is over, I'm not sure I'll really be who any of you know, anymore. I'm always terrified that...." He pauses. Takes a breath. "I will wake one day and realize that I gave up on the things that made the parts of my life here that I love real."
IanIt was a long drive to make for something as simple as an outdoor hike. There was, after all, plenty of picturesque scenery both in and around Denver proper. Ian had no real reason to be at the Chantry, in particular, beyond the fact that it was the Chantry. That the place was sprawling and calm and beautiful and resonated with rejuvenating energy.
And if there were other reasons, he kept them to himself.
His car wound its way up the road, past the field where Sera and Kalen were discussing the nature of magic. All the way to the end of the driveway, where he parked. His first impulse was to make his way into the house, going around the back way through the patio door. His eyes cast a surveying glance over the state of the place. Looking, perhaps, for someone in particular. (Listening, sensing.) Perhaps Dan was there to greet him. Perhaps no one way. Either way, he made his way into the kitchen for a glass of water.
SerafíneIan finds Dan in the kitchen, cleaning up the necessaries for Sera's ritual. By now he has thrown away the spent shrooms and scrubbed the pot thoroughly so that the first person who decides to make mac'n'cheese using that little pot will not have an unexpected surprise. The tall consor greets Ian quietly, lifts his chin toward the front field. That vague direction. Informs Ian quietly that Sera intends to ward the place. That Kalen's with her, down at the easternmost edge of the property, maybe a bit beyond.
That's where she was going to start.
SerafíneKalen considers correcting her - not now, maybe later. There's no bloody reason she should expose herself to the weather the way she does except she has a particular sense of fashion, and in moments like this she doesn't really feel the cold as cold, precisely. Her senses are so warped that she feels close and she feels warm and she feels pacingly constrained and she wants her shoes off for both no reason and every reason.
But something that Kalen says brings her blazingly back into focus, and what he says brings tears right back to her eyes. Sera breathes out sharply. She lets go that effect she hardly understands she initiated, which turned words into - what, something lovely, moving, visible. Lets go of her sense of place too and is reaching for - what she hardly knows to name. The borders of the place. the boundaries of it.
"Fuck, Kalen. Why the hell do you think you're going to let go? Please don't be afraid of that. Just hold on like hell, yeah? That's all you need to do. And if you let it go - grab like fuck until it's back in your hands. I swear to god. That's in your power.
"Everything isn't, but that much is. You know?"
IanIan was dressed in warm athletic clothes and a shiny black and silver windbreaker. Maybe he meant to go for a run, maybe just a hike. He greeted Dan with a familiar tip of his head. They spoke briefly while Ian finished off his drink. When he was done, he moved through the house and exited the front door, trotting down the stone steps to make his way into the field.
And out there, in the distance, stood two all-too-familiar figures.
Ian broke into a jog, moving with quiet agility across the cold and brittle ground. As he neared, his steps slowed to a more relaxed pace, approaching with enough caution to be sure he wasn't interrupting Sera's ritual.
(But no, they were talking.)
"Feel like company?" he asked this of them both, eyes sliding from Sera to hover a moment on Kalen.
Kalen HollidayKalen laughs and there is something wild in it. "You make it sound easy. Maybe it is. I got Christmas trees. And ornaments. Some with the year on them. Because then I can do-" The same thing next year, he doesn't finish because Ian is coming. And he adores Ian; Hell, he's still in love with Ian. Learning Life magic from Ian was a different kind of vulnerability. He's not sure about this one.
Grab like fuck until it's back in your hands, Serafine had said. And if it never had been?
He smiles anyway, and he means it, because he does like to see Ian. "Hey. Sure."
SerafíneOooh, Perception + Awareness-as-empathy on Kalen.
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )
SerafíneThen: Ian, who asks if they feel like company and Sera is smiling, smiling - her senses blown out, her pupils enormous by now though that may be hard to see in the failing light. But she smiles at Ian and her gaze slides from Ian to Kalen and back again and Kalen says, "Hey. Sure."
He's still in love with Ian. Adores him.
Sera still thinks Ian is kind of a jerk.
That's okay. It's all okay.
--
Sera's dark make-up is smeared from the tears she shed earlier and maybe some of the tears still in her eyes, but what else could one expect of her? She is nothing if not messy, and her messy attention is centered on Kalen more than Ian (even that glance slides back, as if Kalen had some specific gravity tonight) but she still gives Ian this kind of smile. "I don't mean that it is easy. I mean it's fucking not. It's exactly the opposite of it. But you don't spare yourself - or anyone else - by waiting for it. By expecting it.
"Fuck." Another glance at Ian, still half-smiling. "We were talking about magic, and letting it happen to you, and then I think we started talking about something else entirely. Making other shit happen instead of just waiting. Kalen, I know this sound weird.
"But I care about you. I know you care about me. I just want you to be present in your life. I know you've lost a fuckin hell of a lot - but we're all here now. And maybe you've lost pieces of that, and maybe you'll lose more later - but right now, right here. You know? I want you to be here, instead of being afraid of yesterday or tomorrow, of hubris or vanity.
"I sound like an asshole. But I fucking mean it."
IanIt was, actually, a very similar speech to the one that Ian himself had given Kalen. Only Sera knew how to make it feel poignant. And in that moment, Ian felt very much as though he had interrupted. Maybe because it wasn't really his place any longer to judge Kalen on how he lived his life. Maybe it never had been.
He let his hands slide into the pockets of his jacket, angling his gaze toward the sky for a moment - as though suddenly aware of the stars. When his attention refocused (it never really left,) he fell into place near Kalen's side, splaying a hand against the small of Kalen's back. Gentle and grounding. Affectionate, even.
"Don't worry Sera, you'll never sound like a bigger asshole than me. And, for the record, I agree with you."
Kalen HollidayBe here. Right now. It what all of your friends tell you.
He relaxes a little when Ian reaches out him. "For the record, as neither of you has thrown anything at me and then threatened me, you are not even in the running for most abrasive version of this conversation. Alyssa threw a boot at my head. Right after I got out of the fucking hospital and couldn't dodge." There is only affection in his tone though. Boot-throwing is within the threshold of things Kalen will interpret as love.
[And, sadly, you get probably one more post from me before I fall asleep.]
SerafíneSomehow, beneath all that, Kalen's affection (over post-hospital boot-throwing and whatever else is beneath that that Sera does not know or understand) seems as if it is constructed of -
Wait. No. She breathes out. Watching Kalen relax into Ian's touch. Is aware, also, of Ian's touch. The affection. The support. She smiles.
The world is starting to spin again and she gives herself over to that. Sera takes another breath in that feels spiked and entangled and some part of her wants to pull everything - everything - right back into herself.
"You guys should go make out or something," she murmurs, lifting her hands to her golden curls, pushing her fingers through the mass. Reaching, reaching.
Reaching.
"I need to Work."
IanYou guys should go make out or something.
Ian smirked, but the expression lacked bite. He let his hand fall away from Kalen's back. "Sure you'll be okay?"
He'd seen Sera work before. Knew full well how powerful she could be. But he asked anyway, because she was high, and because the forces they worked with were not always forgiving. Because he didn't like leaving people alone when they were vulnerable.
"I can send Dan out."
He didn't respond to the suggestion of intimacy between himself and Kalen. Maybe he didn't feel like it needed a response. But either way, if Sera confirmed that she did, in fact, wish them to go, then he would - placing a light touch to Kalen's shoulder to indicate that he should follow.
Kalen HollidayRegardless of what Serafine says, Kalen promised Dan earlier about what he would do if he left her. One way or another, Dan will know.
He follows after Ian easily enough; for all that he can be protective as he can be of Serafine, he reserves that for mostly different situations. Tonight, she gets to Work.
[Thank you both for scenes! *flop*]
SerafíneIan offers to send Dan out and Sera - who is now wearing denim cut-offs and a t-shirt and fishnets and combat boots on a night when the low is expected to be below freezing, makes this lovely dismissive sound. She's an adult. She's a Disciple. She can totally take care of herself.
And yet, somehow, everyone who has ever met her knows that for a lie.
There's enough awareness there, though, that Ian might well be confident in the thought that Sera requires no one. He doesn't know how powerful the hallucinogen she ingested was. He may not even understand (though perhaps he does) how thoroughly feckless she is. But Kalen does - or at the very least, Kalen made a promise to the consor that he wouldn't leave Sera alone.
So they leave her. And they - at some point - inform Dan that they have left her, and where. And she gives herself over to her high. Sinks to her knees on the blanket, then back to her haunches. Sags back for a time, and just allows herself to feel. The space around her. This great abiding sense of it.
She has no idea how long that lasts. How long it takes her to gather herself to herself, until she starts to -
Oh - the first piece is exquisite, somehow both piercing and hidden but the second piece comes up so wrong it leaves her retching. And maybe that's what she needs - to drive strangers away. That wrongness not just the rightness. So she works: alll night and perhaps alll day, until she has spent herself, whole and entire. Until she is done.
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