I'm not Irish and green beer is gross.

Kalen Holliday

[How awake are we?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (1, 4, 5, 6, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Kalen Holliday

[This is what happens when you stop spending all your time reading Neruda and playing adorable message tag and daring to be a person Kalen....]

[How distracted by Resonance are we?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )

Serafíne

There is a certain late afternoon light that grabs the edge of the horizon - just seizes it - and spills itself across the flinty horizon, over the snow-capped peaks. Clear spring days, bright and effortless, fading into wintry nights that are so open they feel arctic: with a brilliant, brittle chill that spreads itself down from that high, clear sky.

It is that hour; it is such a night, and the chantry house is lit up but those lights are banked and nearly blank because it is such a clear, dark night that the world feels far, far larger than one ever remembers it is. That's the scene through the kitchen windows, bleeding in through the edges of the space. The current residents of the kitchen have opened the blinds and the curtains wide to let that light and the sense of space inside, but otherwise the scene is quite domestic:

Sera, seated on the kitchen counter, long leg in thigh-high fishnets in a straight-line stripe pattern, denim cut-offs and a too-large band t-shirt that is sliding down to bare her right shoulder. Hair pulled back into the world's messiest chignon, which is in turn wrapped in nail-head studded leather. She's resting her chin on her right knee, poking her toes out through the holes in the fishnet weave, painting her toenails rather meditatively with a color that is some irridescent shade of black while also murmuring something to Dan, who is attending to a couple of pots on the stove.

Kalen Holliday

Kalen walks into the Chantry. This time doesn't hesitate about coming to see anyone, not even to put away groceries. Not that that would help him today. But then, he's not really carrying groceries today. Serafine has seen Kalen mostly in black and grays, though sometimes he plays with color. He has been known to wear blue jeans. And she's seen him, on occasion, with make up. Very little, but sometimes a thing he plays with. Today Kalen shows up in jeans and hiking boots and a dark brown corduroy coat. Despite a little bit of dirt, it's obvious that everything but the coat, which is vintage, is new. The coat fits so perfectly he is either incredibly lucky or had the coat tailored - quite possibly the second because though the outside has some minor scars the lining of the coat, which is a paisley pattern in cream and brown and gold, seems new.

He hangs a leather satchel over the back of one of the chairs and then flops into it. "Hey." His attention, normally so centered on Serafine, lingers a bit on Dan tonight. Lingers on both of them, here and there, almost as though seeing them for the first time.

Serafíne

Sera: Perception + Empathy on Kalen. Emotionsssss?

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Serafíne

"Hey."

Dan greets Kalen first. His voice is richer than you remember, more baritone than tenor, and rough about the edges. There's something comforting about that. The edge of a sort-of-smile bleeds through the scruff of his blond beard. He has a pan and flips something over in it. Asks, with another, more assessing glance, "Everything okay?"

Sera, she takes her time. Painting toenails when you are a little bit high requires concentration but she is only a little bit high so she looks up - luminous - catches the way Kalen's gaze lingers on Dan - then back. This bright edge to her, strange and thoughtful and drifting over the new clothes, the vintage leather coat, what she can see of the lining, everything.

"You look nice tonight. I like that coat."

Kalen Holliday

Kalen's emotions are...difficult to pin down. Not because Kalen is hiding them, but because Kalen doesn't really have much for either any real idea what he thinks right now and because there are a lot of emotions present - overwhelming more as a symphony than a few steady ones. There is definitely something about the way he looked at Dan, like there was some reason or connection that wasn't there before. Grateful and curious, but maybe also a little wary. Other than that he seems...almost like the entire world is new and fascinating. Like all of the myriad possibilities is suddenly, and perhaps overwhelmingly, enthralling. He also, despite the things that must merit his attention based on the Ginger post and their past few encounters, lighter than she might expect.

"Well," he says to Dan, "Wherever the world is ending tonight if it isn't stopped isn't here. That's something." It's hard to tell precisely how he means that, because he sounds like that answer is serious enough, but there is a trace of amusement flickering around the edges of his tone. Something relaxed and golden and radiant. "How're you?"

"Yeah?" He asks Serafine. "I thought it might be fun." The coat? He definitely means something more complicated than the coat. "I think it's older than I am, but I haven't looked. Maybe one day. I'm sure it has all the stories."

Serafíne

Dan breathes out a huff of laughter. The expression is wry rather than deep, the corner of his mouth still hooked, chin rising as he takes in that response. Not precisely looking for anything deeper than both the intention and the flicker of amusement. "I'm good. Fixing Sera a reuben because it's St. Patrick's day and she refuses to drink green beer."

"I'm not fucking Irish and green beer is fucking gross."

Someone interjects, angling her elfin chin toward Dan without lifting her eyes from the delicate work of painting her nails.

"Want one?" Dan to Kalen, here. "Sauerkraut's made by a friend of ours who's getting into fermentation." Of course they have friends who are getting into fermentation.

--

Sera, for her part, half-smiles at Kalen. Presses her mouth into the bony prominence of her knee. "I think you mean something more complicated than that coat. Dan says you got some kind of ultimatum from one of your contacts? All-in or all-out?"

Kalen Holliday

Kalen laughs at the pronouncement about green beer. Does he want a reuben? He has never had one. Not as any of the people he has been. But never before has he known people who had friends who were getting into fermentation. And the new skin he is trying on seems like someone who could be into reubens and knowing people who get into fermentation. Maybe he makes kombucha. That sounds like fun. It seems to go with photography and a telescope he hasn't yet assembled and -

Wait. There was a question. Does he want a reuben.

He smiles and nods. "Yeah. Thanks. I've never had one but that sounds cool."

And then Serafine is pulling his attention back to vampires and ultimatums. "Well. Kind of the coat. I mean. And the camera and telescope and I bought a pool table." He says this like it has some kind of meaning beyond the fact that he has more disposable income than he knows what to do with.

"That part of the equation is rather simple. Ultimatums...well...they might be part of complex situations but in themselves they have two likely outcomes. Sometimes you can add a few, but they're relatively uncomplicated. But yes, Iris is getting ready to move and she needs to know whether to expect us to be with her.

"It looks like probably not. Which...there are good things and bad things about that. Still, maybe better than leaping in with a bull in a china shop impression."

Serafíne

Dan scratches his beard a bit as Kalen both accedes to a reuben and informs Dan that he's never had one. Doesn't know that much about Kalen's skins, the past skins on the new one that he is trying on, but gives Kalen another wry look and, in deference (for the moment) to Sera's question about ultimatums does not continue to chat about hot deli sandwiches, just sets about making it. Simple: homemade pumpernickel bread sliced thin, spread with homemade thousand island dressing, slathered with the sauerkraut made by someone getting-into-fermentation and topped with roast beef, all with some butter on the griddle.

It sizzles as he puts it down. Checks the low heat and turns the other one over, just waiting for it to hit that perfect state of crisp.

Dan glances at Sera. She is - struggling - a bit to understand where they are, and how and why now. Needs a scorecard and some coaching. Doesn't really think of herself as smart.

"You say, it looks like probably not. Because of us I suppose? If it were up to you Kalen, what would you do?"

Kalen Holliday

"I think that, whatever else is going on, I don't want something like Lilean Holdings operating in my city. Maybe they aren't running their human trafficking ring through Denver, and maybe those ghosts predate their ownership of the club. They very well could. But they are evil, Serafine."

He sighs and his eyes trace over to watch what Dan is doing. "I care about the souls trapped in that place and I care about the people who are going to get hurt. But whatever we do here, people will be hurt. There are few enough of us that we can't be everywhere. This fight, it should be ours. They all are, really. But within all of our limits. Without knowing what else it might stir up. Knowing that, whether for better or worse reasons than ours someone in Denver is already fighting them...." Again he sighs, eyes still on complicated sandwich alchemy.

"I think that I would likely let it go. At least for now. Maybe, if I came to understand it better, I might change that. There is certainly an opportunity here, to strike. A good one. And, make no mistake, it would be striking at evil. I'm just not sure that's enough on its own anymore. Even for me."

Kiara

There are those like Kiara Woolfe that can deconstruct and reconstruct their bodies to that of other forms. Other creatures. Shapeshift, for lack of any better word for it. Certainly there are no few to whom Kiara would call her family that spend time in the skin of wolves; of other large creatures. There's something almost poetic about it to the Verbena, the idea that you'd offer so much of yourself to the Craft (and to the Earth) you might simply transcend one variation of self in favor of another.

She's heard the stories, of course, horrifying ones about the complications of things like metamorphosis and yet there are times when she feels her skin itch as if it knows she's contemplating the possibilities of one day; when you're ready. Not yet but --

"Hey."

They probably feel her before they hear her; the cyclic energy; the rustle of clothing; Kiara in a purple jacket with zips everywhere and a knitted cap half covering her dark hair. She's leaning into the doorway; fingers wedged into pockets; the loop of keys around her knuckles. All red lips and dramatic eyeliner and there is, always, that feral quality to her, Kiara. That element of the unintentional (mostly) predator. She's smiling in Dan's direction because something he's frying smells amazing.

Unfolds herself a little from her perch.

Glances from Kalen, to Serafine. "I hate the idea of people's energy being trapped in there." A quiet throw in to their conversation; the Verbena meanders toward a bowl of fruit on the counter; picks up an apple and turns it over in her palms.

Serafíne

No one has really told Sera about the human trafficking rings, the ghosts, the rest of it. She has never seen a ghost, doesn't really understand that they are, as they are, perhaps cannot fathom why a soul would linger instead of allowing itself to dissolve back into the great fastness of the universe from which we arise to which we return: whatever is beyond these bodies. She doesn't think much beyond this body, just lives within it, here and now, anchored and aware.

"Dan said Grace wanted to burn the place down. Which seems - " a brief, sharp breath in. "Excessive, you know? The unintended consequences: we own each one that follows from our choices."

--

Dan, flipping the sandwiches, makes a quiet noise in the back of his throat.

"If you're that concerned about the company proper, why not take them all down? You don't have to kill anything, don't even have to get your hands dirty. Grace is a hacker and this is a privately held company, with some international dealings.

"All she has to do is set something up so that it looks like they're using those clubs as a cover to launder money for ISIS or some international terrorist organization. Go back far enough and make it real enough to get the government's attention, make sure there are enough smoking guns to smoke them out, or at least give them headaches and heartaches for a very long time."

--

Sera has stopped painting her toenails. Glances up as Kiara walks in and watches the other woman as she walks, dark eyes sliing from eyes to red lips to the curve of her hips beneath the bottom hem of the jacket.

"What would you need to do to set them free?"

Kalen Holliday

"The thought had occurred to me. But...honestly...there are a few people who have expressed concerns about what happens if we set the balance of power they're part of here, which we don't really understand, off from what it is now. It could be better. It could be much worse. I don't know.

"They already lost the Dolphin, one of their clubs. We may not have to intervene at all. But, even if we do, it need not be on any terms but our own. I think there are possibilities in working with Iris that are rare. But...that is not the same as thinking that the outcomes are all good. They are just...uncommon. What she is proposing, what we have here, what we are about to walk away from...it is a chance we won't see again. And part of me wants to take it, just for that. Part of me wants to try to wrap my hands around a new and incomprehensible world in the hope that it will have more light.

"But that hope is slim. And it is not really justification for all the horrors it might unleash."

He shrugs a little. "As to the ghosts...I am given to understand there are more trapped souls than we can really help as well. I do not like to leave them, particularly when I had found a way to reach them. But there are a few of them there, and while I certainly have concern for them, if this goes badly it may well lead to more ghosts than it lays to rest."

Serafíne

"Right but - " Dan exhales, softly. Takes the first of the reubens off the griddle, finally. Checks the second one, then goes back to the first, cutting it in half with the edge of his spatula. Some of the sauerkraut starts to ooze out.
"You understand what I'm saying, don't you? If the corporation is providing the structure and the means and engaging in the criminal behavior to which you object the most and you want to do something to disrupt their systems, that's smart. It makes sense. You do it in the most hands-off way possible. Then, you don't have to worry about firemen dying in a fire Grace set: just about figuring out how to create the sort of cybertrail that would entangle them in investigations and litigation for years to come.

"There, you've acted. You've acted in a way that brings a spotlight back to them and impedes their ability to function with the impunity they have come to count on."

--

Sera, quiet, shoots a glance at Dan. THIS IS ALL FUCKING GREEK TO HER, OR KUMQUATS, but her eyes are liquid, quiet, changeable, and they swing back to Kalen listening as he remarks with some passion that part of him wants to wrap his hands around a new and incomprehensible world in hopes that it will have more light.

"I'm sorry Kalen I don't - " pause, glance. "I don't really understand what she was proposing, except she wanted you to join her and act like her ally. Because you sound pretty fucking idealistic you know? Almost mournful, too. Like we're leaving something on the table that might make shit better and I just want to get that - understand it, you know?"

Vampires, Whatever

Serafíne

Saturday night just after sunset, this warm-ish day failing into a chilly night. There's no longer any snow on the ground around the chantry house, though snow lingers on the peaks visible here and there from the chantry grounds, and maybe in some quiet hollows on the south side of the scrubby trees bordering the pasture. Everything is mudlucious, though. Damp, thawing, full of the promise of spring.

No extra vehicles in the driveway: not just now, but still Sera's resonance is a distinct undercurrent against those of Trinity and also of the Node. Perhaps Annie is in her woodshop, working, and the others out. The house is otherwise empty, except for Sera. She's downstairs in the living room, has slide down from the couch to sit cross-legged, bare-legged on the floor. Has a chenille blanket wrapped around her shoulders and a fire going in the fireplace and a few candles lit and a pot of tea on a wrough-iron trivet on the coffee table, covered in a knitted tea-cozy with the word IRONY worked into the design, tone-on-tone.

A cup of tea with no more than a soupcon of whiskey to warm it on the table, and a leatherbound notebook open in her lap, pen idle in her right hand. Mostly - mostly - she's staring mute out the double-glass-doors over the dark, dark field that fronts the property. Watching night gather herself close.

Kiara

Night is lacerated eventually by the twin points of headlights; they wash over the windows; the decisive sound of a car engine rumbling closer as it bounces ungently over the ground; freshly bare of snow yet somehow all the more perilous for it. The car is familiar, at least, a small red hatchback; still as desperately in need of washing as it had been the last time Serafine had reason to glimpse it.

Had seen its owner; who emerges in a slamming of doors; the jingling of keys set against a palm and of course, that wash of what has become Kiara. That folding and unfolding of life; that cyclic presence of hers that was at once soothing and unsettling. She's been absent for only a short while but in their world this may as well be eons. So much could happen in their lives in a short week; two. Kiara's boots on the doorstep; she's wiping the muck off them; unwinding a scarf; jacket even as the door opens for her.

As she steps inside; tapping the evidence of the earth's renewal from the grooves of her footwear; her dark hair a wild bramble of waves falling around thin shoulders.

"Anyone home?"

The greeting is an unnecessary nicety and she's aware of it, but she performs it regardless; slinking into the depths of the ranch with this jingle of adornments; with a wash of spice and something vaguely sweeter.

Kalen Holliday

[How awake are we?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (1, 4, 4, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Kalen Holliday

Kalen comes to the House. Sometimes he comes to the House because he wants to be near the Node, or to be near where he knows the spirit-bear is even if he doesn't know where she is, or because he wants to see other Mages if they're there, or because he is decorating for holidays. Tonight he comes bearing gifts, but they are just groceries and more alcohol. It is very important to have enough alcohol in stock for the apocalypse. As he well remembers. Even if that was not, precisely, a real apocalypse.

He does not call out and he does not head for the living room. Instead, he carries things into the kitchen. Tucks them quietly enough into cabinets, but the sounds of movement are still audible.

Serafíne

Awareness!

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 8) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

Dex + Crafts: sketching.

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 8, 8) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

Dex + Expression: for the sketches?

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 9) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne

Anyone home? Kiara calls out and Sera is already shaken out of her reverie by the unsettling and familiar pull of the other woman's resonance: at her skin, at her bones. The natural cycles that truthfully Sera gives precisely no fucks about except when they turn themselves back around into poetry or sensation: as now. The scrambling sense of being both consumed and reborn.

She: inhales. Pulls her shoulders back, stretches a bit and arches her lovely spine and feels the joints pulling and popping and she is, lovely thing, really rather sober, wrapped around with warmth, waiting for Dan to return with Chinese take-away for her dinner and watching day swim into night and thinking-without-thinking, which is a way that she has of letting everything settle into her skin and waiting to see how she feels.

But here: anyone home?

"Downstairs!" Sera calls out, quite as if she owned the place, which she does not, voice ringing and voice rising from where she sits curled on the floor. Waits until she sees the whites of Kiara's before she: smiles, the curve of her mouth as fine as the moon, her hair messy and loose, the shaved fringe grown-out a bit, though no more than half-inch. Sharp little ear pierced through with a platinum safety pin and a stainless steel bar.

"Hey," then, still smiling that lazy-I-just-woke-up smile, which is her default omg I'm sober smile, "want some tea?"

--

The book in her lap is open. A handful of vignettes, there. She has been trying to capture faces. The technique is - rather modest.

Sera picks up the book and puts it on the coffee table, glances back up the stairs. Can hear Kalen putting away groceries and listens for a moment, feeling the new undercurrent of his storm.

Kiara

[Oh yes, I forgot to do this earlier.]

Dice: 5 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Kiara

Hey.

"Hey, yourself." This, with a knocked out hip; the jut of it against a doorframe; a wall; standing with her arms across her chest and this expression that's at once fond and a little - perhaps, as her eyes scope out the book; Serafine's state of sobriety - uncertain before it levels into that easy; known smile.

The Verbena looks pale; a little worn at the edges; her mouth still that same bold slash of red but her demeanor bares a sort of fragility to it that it didn't before. She seems strained; though it's born with the sort of awareness of one who tolerates it more-so than has any intent to conceal it. Still wholly lovely Kiara, in that unrepentant bohemian manner of hers; dressed in layers of earthy brown and gold; in faded jeans and high black boots; yet a vaguely wilted version.

It doesn't hold her tongue, though. Doesn't keep her smiles from radiating that sort of inviting intimacy and slant of private amusement at some facet of the bigger picture. "Coffee?" Kiara punctuates it with the raise of a brow; sliding off her resting perch and stepping fully into the room.

"Coffee I would sin for." Kalen's making noise in the kitchen; Kiara's focus (and her focus) pulls that way for an instant; she tousles fingers through her hair, breathes out; cants dark eyes toward the book on the coffee table; intrigue bleeds into her expression briefly.

"I didn't know you drew."

Kalen Holliday

The advantages of being only about an entire room away from Kalen, particularly when he is already in a kitchen, is that he will pretty much make coffee constantly. Particularly if he's avoiding things like conversation. So he puts a kettle on, because Kalen insists that the only machine that should ever be involved with coffee makes espresso.

Kalen does not leave the kitchen, does not even really come to the doorway where he might catch a glimpse of Kiara depending on which edge of the door frame she was occupying. He only calls quietly. "Should I get out the ridiculous rock candy stirrers I have stashed around here for Grace, or do you prefer your coffee with less whimsical flair?"

Serafíne

"I don't believe in coffee," Sera murmurs, tipping her head back so that she can just - well - watch - Kiara. The layers of confidence and awareness, the subtle ticks of fondness and uncertainty, knitting themselves together into a wind of the larger whole. " - or in sin, for that fucking matter. I wonder what you'd call one.

"A sin, I mean. There's just Darjeeling unless Kalen obliges you," and Kalen, Sera would imagine, is likely to oblige Kiara. Doesn't he see coffee as a sacrament? "or until Dan gets his ass back here with my breakfast."

This supple hook of her right shoulder as her attention is redirected back to the leatherbound book, open to those sketches.

"I don't really draw. I'm shite at it." And though there's no real trace of her years in Europe in her voice: there is some London in that single word: shite. "But I did some scrying and wanted to capture some of those I saw on paper."

This tick of her attention briefly behind Kiara, beyond the door when Kalen does, in fact, offer her coffee. The edge of her half-formed little smile before her gaze is snagged and drawn back to Kiara. Her focus sharpens, and this is visible, the way her pupils contract and sweep over Kiara's visage. "You okay?"

Kiara

She doesn't believe in coffee.

Kiara's mouth makes this suggestive little squiggle; tipping into a smile as she regards the Cultist. "That right there - " This quiet, throaty admonishment; Kiara's eyes brighter with it. " - is a sin all on it's own." Then Kalen calls from the kitchen something about candy stirrers and Kiara turns to face the direction his voice flows from and retorts, with aplomb: "If it's hot and black Kalen, I'll drink it. No whimsy required for this girl."

Back to the book; the sketches.

Kiara moves to settle on the arm of a sofa; her necklaces knock together hollowly as she does; the quiet clatter of stone and leather and what may or may not have been some sort of silver. Stars and crystals and the supplication to one of the pagan's revered sources of inspiration gleaming and peeking from the layers of her clothing. She pushes her sleeves up; settles with a knee propped; her body curved in a casual slump of easy consideration.

"Ah yes, our wayward guests," a murmur; there's the briefest consternation that knits into the Verbena's brow; pulls at the corners of her smile; tips it downward. Her eyes catch Sera's cursory sweep; the notice of her paler skin; the tautness plied into the way her back straightens under it just so.

The Verbena offers a smile; it doesn't quite reach her eyes; but it gets points enough for effort: "Peachy keen. I just had a long week. Traveled back to New York." She settles back against the spine of the sofa; her eyes sliding away from meeting the Cultist's; briefly.

"You know how it goes."

Kalen Holliday

Kalen leaves the kettle on the stove, drifts across the dining room, and takes up residence in the doorway Kiara just vacated. He looks like he's slept. And despite the way he and Serafine parted ways last they spoke, despite anything that may have happened after that, he is still calm enough. Of course, he's spent much of the past week curled up with Neruda and bottles of wine.

"Hey," he says quietly. It's a general greeting. His eyes take them in, Serafine with her sketches and Kiara with her...whatever is going on with her. He does not ask, does not really express concern unless you're one of those people who is into reading micro-expressions.

"Coffee shouldn't be long." It's spoken softly, in a tone that almost hits what most people would consider concerned. Coffee is love, right. ....right...?

Serafíne

All these bits to notice, all these things to see and hear. The music of her necklaces and the magic of them, the way they hide and show themselves again and Sera like a magpie - or, just now, down below and essentially nesting like a baby bird - watching, watching. And even though Kiara's gaze slides from Sera's when she says it: score one for honesty. The admission brings something brief and passing and tender to Sera's dark eyes. She reaches out to touch Kiara's ankle where her leather boot lolls against the arm of the couch.

Just that.

Then Kalen, he gets "Kalen," and an easy smile and a lift of her chin in invitation. If there was a way they parted there's no real suggestion of it in Sera's eyes except for the minute stitch of her attention - sharpened - closer over him, not unlike that are-you-okay look to Kiara.

"Come and see."

--

Back to Kiara then, and in the interregnum, a certain unwinding that drops the blanket from the spare architecture of a narrow shoulder. Whatever Sera is wearing beneath the blanket, it leaves her right shoulder bare, all bones and hollows, right up to her throat.

"That's the one from the park. The rest were at the nightclub. That woman," an indication, a certain portrait of a dark-eyed, dark-haired singer. " - and those men. The one from the park: her name is Kat."

Spare, sober really. She's learned an awful lot about these things in a few days. Felt Kat's pain and fear and panic, the overwhelming certainty of death-to-come. Live through and within that and a few other things that are keeping her a bit more sober right now.

Kiara

"Kalen." Kiara echoes Serafine with a tilt of her head back against the sofa with a smile and see; for the moment; her hand settled warmly over Sera's. She'd squeezed it just so when it set down over her ankle; all that worn leather; scuffed from long wear.

Briefest of things but the Verbena strokes the edge of her thumb over Serafine's hand before she lets it go in favor of sitting up; in favor of shifting the heavy weight of her hair over a shoulder and scooting a little closer so she can view the sketches.

Picks up the book, perhaps; examines the picture of Kat; cuts a lingering look at Serafine; sets it down gently and gathers the folds of her sweater around her midsection; sets her hands on her lap and leans back; mouth edging down into a frown. Some schism of concern. "And they aren't gathering to take control, right?" Kiara's attention is pulled between both, she cranes to catch Kalen's expression, returns her eyes to Sera.

"There was a few that used to frequent clubs in Manhattan, I remember being told about them." Kiara's throat moves as she swallows; her lower lip drawn between her teeth; there's an absent gesture toward Serafine's sketches. The men. The dark haired singer. "I never got close, though. They never paid us that much attention but - "

Hesitation. Kiara's eyes settle on Sera. "It knows you? What you are?"

Kalen Holliday

Kalen comes down the half-flight of stairs easily enough at the invitation. He joins them, though a bit less in a triangle than to the opposite side of Serafine from Kiara. He too reaches out to take the book for a moment, flips though the sketches. Most he studies. One he lingers on for a second. Rests a fingertip over his face.

"This one," he says quietly, "Is Greyson Addario. He came into Ivory and Gold and about got run out after he started expressing interest in Arionna. But he wasn't welcome there to begin with. He was called in by Lilean Holdings to get the business at the Orchid cleaned up. Because of us or other complications, I don't know. I get the definite impression there is conflict between the vampires here, and it may have been a reference to that. Coded messages are...coded.

"I'm hoping that some of the vampires he is in conflict with can help us to understand them. Possibly help us to stop them. The enemy of our enemy and all." He looks up at Serafine. "For all that he is charming and I love being told I have nice eyes. I...there may be a world where that could happen because I like the way his voice sounds when he recites Neruda in Spanish, but it isn't this one. I know what he is." And he sounds, perhaps, a little wistful. But also serious. Wesley is charming and almost exactly what he would want, but only if he were also alive.

"If it makes you feel any better about it, Ian came to see if possibly I had lost my mind, and we talked, and he will be there. Which may complicate things, but apparently here in Denver we care more about our friends not dying than stopping evil monsters. I can try to roll with that. But it's a little new for me." Except that it isn't. Not now. Not if he admits that the version of him that came to Denver would have risked Derrick killing Alicia in that alley. Would have pressed the attack even with that gun to her head. But this version stopped.

"I think at least some of them can sense us. Which makes sense, since we sense at least some of them. And have ways to see the others."

Serafíne

Our Sera is strangely pensive. Or perhaps not strangely: understandably.

She reaches out and picks up her mug of tea and tags a sip, then another while Kiara and Kalen take their time with the sketches. Her own expression is spare and her features were strangely made-for-it. Odd how stillness settles over her, finds the sharp bits and odd shadows, the arc of her brow and the curve of her neat little mouth, the quick lines framing the corner when Kiara's hand finds her own, when that thumb curves over her knuckles. This glance then: passing but - intimate in its own way.

"Fuck if I know why they're gathering." Another quiet little shrug and Sera starts to unwind the blanket from around her torso. She is wearing: a white spaghetti strapped cami, cotton so thin the shadow of her breasts is evident beneath, and a pair of black silk boxers. Very little jewelry except for her piercings. Ears, primarily, though she is still adorned - with tattoos, all blackwork, on her arms, her shoulderblades, her hands - everywhere. "They're gathered. At this nightclub called the Black Orchid. That seems to be their primary hunting ground. She just took a walk and got a little intoxicated - with want or power - and a bit greedy.

"I hurt her pretty badly. She went back to the club. This man," Sera indicates the portrait of Grayson Addario, "came downstairs to meet her. Took care of her, stayed with her for a while. Later, he called someone and told them to talk to Elias and make sure everyone was on guard in case we tried to track her. This man and Kat - they spoke without speaking. But on the phone he said: "She went after a witch in Washington Park and it nearly killed her."

--

This brief, flicker of a glance upward at Kalen. It is half-lashed. She takes in the information he offers her and absorbs it, including the gracenote about Ian. Well then.

"I don't - " an open mouth, a pause, an arrest, "I don't think we should go getting ourselves involved in their wars. Dan has some fucking history analogy about it. He says allying with Stalin against Hitler is fine to end Auschwitz. Not so fucking great when it blinds you to the purges and the famine and 50 years of the gulag, you know?"

Kiara

Kiara looks at Kalen when he mentions Ian's name; that he'll be there. The expression on her face is not open, not the way it had been briefly earlier when she spoke-but-didn't about New York; there's still the signs of exhaustion etched in there; smudged under her eyes; staining the edge of her mouth far more easily downward into a frown tonight than seems typical for her.

She's scrutinizing something about the arrangements at hand; the slightest incline of neat, dark eyebrows upward; the hint of concern; consternation. The lines that connected them all; this raggedy little makeshift family of theirs was so intricately woven it was hard, at times, to recall who was known to who; how well; when - why. Kiara's eyes flit to Kalen; bank there with even, private contemplation and then return to the drawings.

She draws inward, the Verbena. Studying and listening. Privy to undertows and veiled glances and the pauses between - sits forward at a point and seems to make as if to speak once - Serafine begins and she doesn't quite - and then again, does: "What I know about them, " Kiara's fingertips tap at the edge of Sera's drawing of Kat, "I know through coven dealings. Some of my - other Verbena keep company with them, believe their blood has some kind of immaculate properties for casting. None that I personally know but - it can get dangerous, fast." This a flick of expression toward Kalen.

"Knowing more about them isn't a bad thing, I agree in theory, but - " Kiara's supple mouth twists a little. "Sera - Dan - has a point. We're never going to understand the whole scope of what they're fighting about."

A beat.

"This Wesley - he's still one of them. Vampires can be - " Kiara draws in a breath; cuts a discerning look at Kalen. "Be careful around him. Don't trust him. The enemy of our enemy is still our enemy at the end of the day, yeah?"

Kiara

[Ack! I just realized Kalen didn't say Wesley's name. Plus edit that mention out. Should read from: "Vampires can be - Be careful. Don't trus them." Etc.]

Kiara

[Oh apparently it was mentioned on Ginger. *waves hand* We shall leave it be and carry on. Shh. ]

Kalen Holliday

"I'm not terribly concerned with their war. I am concerned with a human trafficking ring and vampires who have threatened people I care about. I am concerned with the souls trapped at the Orchid, unable to do anything but linger in the place they were killed.

"That they are at war is only of interest to me because it indicates that some of them may be against those things, and that in destroying the specific things I mentioned, some may be of help to us. I don't care to join their war at all. Regardless of whether I may or may not accept the assistance of some of them with, I mean to destroy the vampires that frequent the Orchid."

He looks up at them. Takes his hand away from the sketch. "I know. I do. Trust me. I will be careful and I will shield my mind from his tricks and I will avoid letting him do inconvenient things like kill me.

"I Awakened during a fight with a vampire. I...." He glances away. "I have always found them unsettling." And judging by the softness of the tone and those lowered lashes by unsettling he means fucking terrifying.

"Wesley is charming. But...I know that can be a lie. I'm familiar with how one does that and some of the reasons why. I will not forget what he is."

Serafíne

Sera flashes Kiara a grateful gleam of a look that shifts by subtle, precipitate degrees as she notes how briefly closed the other woman's expression is. Then, something pulled back - banked, beneath her eyes, beneath her tongue, under her skin.

The creature's chin rises and she sets down her mug of tea and reaches out to run the meat of her thumb over the spine of that leatherbound book. When Kalen paged through the remainder of the sketches he might've caught a glimpse of the rest of its contents - doodles and scrawls of words, the beginning of songs, chord notations, anything that appeals to her and should be recorded.

"There's no one at the Black Orchid being held against their will. I don't know anything about ghosts, but - there aren't any people imprisoned there."

A quick hook of her shoulder. "Not the nights I watched the place, and I watched it the night we were attacked and then again, earlier this week, all night long.

"And if they're at war, it could be that removing one of the factions will mean that the pendulum will swing too far the other direction. A different sort of swarm." A brief glance at Kiara, then back to Kalen.

"Kalen," no admonishment here, but a kind something in her voice that is private, personal, that is temporal. "Do you know what it is like when they feed?"

Kiara

Kalen awakened during a fight with a vampire. His revelation; the almost casual way he mentions it startles Kiara. Takes her by surprise; she looks at him suddenly; wholly and totally focused on his face; the way he glances away; keeps looking even after he does and continues to speak.

Her face is not without feeling on the news; her dark eyes are at times sometimes a little too pervasive - the way they set and stay; steady and intent. There's a gleam of something tender for a moment to them; sympathetic and warm. She feels that; the trauma of what he went through.

"It was fire for me." A quiet offering; like earth scattered in the wake of a funeral; nothing but that. A scant, brief gesture that is thrown into the conversation before Kiara's eyes shift away to listen as the Cultist asks if he knows what it's like when they feed. The Verbena's shoulders hunch a little as her head drops forward; Kiara makes some private; brief study of the floor.

It's a conversation that isn't hers; not this part; though she does lift it to add, to Serafine: "If we go back, to watch again, I can make it a little safer. Keep certain things at a distance. It might keep everything out but if they're aware - if they're looking - " Kiara sits back. "It couldn't hurt to have some precautions in place."

Kalen Holliday

He feels Kiara's attention, and he does not flinch away from her eyes when he looks back up. The trauma of his Awakening isn't fresh at all. He's spoken of it often enough, for all that some Mages avoid the subject. He seems more bothered by admitting that vampires are unsettling than by the memory itself.

Kiara's admission earns her a quick flash of a grateful half-smile. He may not have needed that moment, but he knows that it means something.

"I have never allowed-" He stops, for a second at the sound of the kettle. "I have never allowed on to bite me," he says as he rises. "Sorry. Right back."

And he is back, barely any time later, with a French press of coffee just starting to turn golden and two mugs. No sugar. No cream.

Serafíne

Kiara and Kalen both share their moment of awakening: some trauma, some flash of insight. Sera does not add anything, no particular trauma of her own. The truth is she hardly knows when she woke up. It happened: gradually, this accretion of awareness and understanding and somehow it seemed to her that perhaps her eyes had always been open, that perhaps that was why she was shut away for so long.

Here she is though. Dark gaze flicking up to follow Kalen as he leaves the room to return with the French press. Kiara offers her assistance if they go back, and Sera breathes in and nods. There's a half-smile ghosting across her mouth that flags then rises again. "Yeah, cool," she accepts, easily enough. "I'd like that."

Kalen tells them that he has never allowed one to bite him. Sera's gaze is banked, flashes from Kalen to Kiara was he disappears, comes back with the coffee and mugs.

"I didn't really believe in them," her half-smile, "until like a week and a half ago so," this narrow shrug. "But when I scryed back to that night I was listening to her thoughts too, and those of the man she was with. I did that when I scryed the Black Orchid as well."

This neat little expression, though for the first time all night Sera avoids both pairs of eyes. In scrying: she lived this. All of it. Sublimates, now, whatever that felt like to her. "It's intensely pleasureable, consumingly pleasureable - like sex without the mess and the laughter and the intimacy and the foreplay and the buildup, and without the give and take.

"There is only take, but it is an ecstatic plunge into the moment of climax so intense you don't really have any way of processing that you are utterly at a monster's mercy, that you might be about to die."

--

Her phone buzzes on the table, just as Kalen sits down Sera stands up, blanket unwinding. "Dan's here with my food, I'm gonna go get to door for him. Be right back - "

Kiara

She doesn't share all of it of course. The tradition behind it; the trickery and the manipulation; the testing of the old ways against the newcomers but there's a reason, of course, that Kiara has the feelings she does on much of her tradition. A reason why she mistrusts far easier than anything; why she balks at the notion of certain kinds of intimacy; trust was a many layered thing and when your awareness is born on the heels of it being stripped; maligned and inverted - it couldn't but leave marks. Scars on the psyche, scars on some deeper level that at the present, was neither here or there but -

Scars. She had her own; nuance is avoided on the subject; from both her and Kalen.

Still, Kiara's eyes follow him for a long moment before they return to Sera. Before her expression shifts; becomes perceptibly less a thing of sentiment and more honed interest. She accepts a cup of coffee from him wordlessly; wraps both hands around it and keeps it close as Serafine talks of the way Vampires feed. The rapture of it; the physical pleasure and release; the Verbena's features don't transmit any disgust or fear as Sera talks but rather a very keen alertness.

There's the slightest impression of a smile hinted at somewhere. The carnality of the act; the sharing of something as sacred as blood; as bodily fluid; it's not a surprise that one of Kiara's ilk would find some semblance of attraction to it; understanding and comprehension of why.

Why it was hard to resist; why it was next to impossible to escape that sort of total surrender to the primal. Serafine doesn't look at either of them as she says all this and maybe that's for the best - what Kiara's expression brooks isn't clear judgment; repulsion; though she schools it well enough to keep it polite. Corrected for the company.

The mood. When Sera rises; Kiara is sipping her coffee; glancing at the door. She nods, briefly, takes up another thread with Kalen easily as the Cultist passes through. "I have various connections with access to more unusual literary inclinations. I could ask about books. History. I don't know how useful any of it would be but maybe - " She shrugs a shoulder. "I have a friend back in Brooklyn who ran an occult store. Mixed in with the hocus pocus - " Here a briefly little private smile; a recognition of sorts, of what the greater world made of her like; their like.

"There could be something useful."

Kalen Holliday

"That...." Kalen pauses. And there is a part of him, the part that loved staying up all night with strangers and dancing on street corners and trying practically anything and everything once, that is more curious than alarmed. What would that be like? "That sounds like not the best position to be in." His eyes follow Sera as she stands and he nods. Brief goodbye as she goes to get Dan? Letting her know he hears her warning? Both?

His attention slides back to Kiara. "I would be interested in seeing. Grace and I have a library. Well, we each have out own, but we're working on a way to scan them and share them, similar to Ginger. Anyway, we're pretty much open to anyone who wants to come check it out. Grace and I pretty much live there, and Elijah. So...there's generally someone to let you in."

Sera, scrying [In progress]

Sera

Okay. She is doing three separate effects on two different days. The first effect she is casting during daylight hours @ Washington Park. She'll put up a mind shield first (music is her focus), then huddle up with Dan and smoke a joint as her focus for the Time 2 / Mind 3 divination she is performing. She is heading back in time to the night she and Grace were attacked in the park. She will be looking for the vampire and the other figure with the vampire and will be reading at least the vampire's mind, or trying to read the vampire's mind.

Mind Shield: 5 successes.

Time 2 / Mind 3 effect (rolled as coincidental) - 6 successes.

Then, Sera and Dan leave the park. I think she either has a permanent lease on the cabin where they stashed Leigh or has purchased it. Either way: that's where they are going. From that cabin (just in case something crawls back over her correspondence link - so she's far from both the chantry and from her home), Sera is going to go back and scry the Black Orchid: Correspondence 2 / Time 2. She is specifically looking for the night the vampire fled back there, listening / watching as much as she can (especially what happened when the vampire she injured showed up there: how much does the vampire know / tell about what happened?). She smokes a joint and takes a half-tab of acid for this one. Correspondence is harder for her and requires more umph.

Correspondence 2 / Time 2 - effect, rolled as coincidental - 9 successes

Night 2: Sera spends the day / night at the cabin. She starts the next night with another mind shield:

Mind Shield, night 2: six successes.

Then, starting right about sundown (smoking a joint, taking a half-tab of acid, ready to supplement later on with the other half-tab) she is working to scry the Black Orchid, looking for vampires to help her narrow her focus.

Correspondence 2 / Life 1 effect - rolled as coincidental - 8 successes.

She is just paying attention to the rhythm of the place, looking for people on whom to focus, that sort of thing. This is just an initial scouting mission, so to speak.

[Supporting rolls in the transcript]

Howl ST

Divination at the Park:

Sera returns to the park. She returns to that night when the vampire attacked her and Grace, searching back until she sees the dark, wintery landscape laid out before her. Until she sees herself sitting on a bench by the lake. Until she sees a woman and a man walking together through the snow.

The woman - the vampire - is leaning into the man, as though unsteady. As though the snow makes it harder for her to stand in heeled boots. As though perhaps she has been drinking. But she has not. Her mind is clear. The man has though. His face is flushed. He seems pleased. His arm wraps around the woman's shoulders and pulls her close. Keeping her warm, keeping her steady - even though it is him that needs the support. She is beautiful, this woman. Sera scarcely got to see her before, but she can see now.

The woman's mind is clear. This is a dance to her - one she thinks she knows all the steps to. It is by design that she lets her prey think thathe is in control. She is hungry. Maybe the echo of it will remind Sera of someone else. The woman is hungry, and when she looks up at the man, she is thinking of the artery that lies just beneath the skin of his throat. She is thinking of what his blood will taste like. There is anticipation. Pleasure. A predatory rush of excitement.

Then she sees Sera and Grace by the lake. She sees them, but she keeps walking. There is a turning of thoughts in her head: should she change course? No. She is hungry, and they will not see her feed. (She does not seem to know who she is looking at - or what they are capable of.) So she spots that tree and leads the man to it. He makes a joke about making out in the park like teenagers, and she says, all hungry and wry, that she was thinking of putting her mouth somewhere else. That's when he laughs, pleased and excited. She lets him think the obvious. It's part of the dance. When they reach the tree, she presses him up against it. They are out of view of the lake, but she wants to make sure that no one sees, so she calls the shadows to her in her mind. This part is unsettling. It is like the woman's thoughts are made of shadow. Like darkness calling to darkness. (Not the natural kind. Not simply the absence of light. A kind of darkness that is tangible - that has been infused with all the properties of childhood nightmares.) She calls the shadows, and they come. They wrap around her and the man just as she leans in. Just as her fangs meet his neck.

It is absolute ecstasy. The man loses all sense. He lets her bite him. Does not fight the shadowy darkness that crawls over him. Does not even seem capable of it. All he knows, all he feels, is the ecstasy of that kiss. And for a few moments, that is all the vampire feels as well. It is remarkably, unnervingly like sex - the way it brings them together at the height of this single, shared moment. But it is not sex. Sex is not an act of vampirism. Sex does not end in one person consuming the other. (No, that is not always true. But that is how it should be.)

She drinks his blood, and it is difficult for her to keep her thoughts present. Her mind wants to regress - to become this lower, animal thing. She wants to drink him dry, and her control slips. She takes too much. She knows she does, but she is so. hungry. Finally she forces herself to stop. She knows she can't kill him. It would be waste. And it would put her and... others at risk. There is a brief flicker of faces in her mind. A dark haired, tan skinned woman. A pale, lanky man with odd, dark eyes. The one that sticks in her mind the longest is of a handsome brunette with a light goatee and a hungry smile. She wishes he was there with her now. Hunting together. Sharing this moment with her.

She licks the man's neck. Sera can see it through the woman's eyes. Can see how the puncture wounds close. But he loses consciousness and slumps down against the trunk of the tree.

The woman thinks about leaving. But she is still hungry. And Sera and Grace are so close. There is a high buzzing through her brain. It's making her reckless. So she calls the shadows again. She calls them and this time she makes the darkness wide and impenetrable, and she tells it to engulf the two people by the lake. The darkness is cover and protection. It gives her the upper hand. It is also terrifying, she knows. There is a bit of a thrill in that. Reckless, yes, but she enjoys it anyway. If they remember her, she will make them forget.

The attack is not simple aggression. She is hunting. She means to feed from them. She goes for Grace first because Grace screams and runs, and she doesn't intend to let her escape. But then the shadows part for a moment and she turns and sees Sera...and that light. She doesn't understand what she is seeing. Only knows, in a split-second instinct, that something horrible is about to happen, and that she has misjudged her prey. When the light hits, the pain is unbearable. It eviscerates her body, and she screams. She forgets the hunt. She forgets the man by the tree. All she knows now is pain and panic and fear. She wants to run, but even walking is an act of will. Still, her panic makes her desperate, and she manages to limp away. She thinks surely that Sera will follow and kill her. But she doesn't. And finally the woman makes it out of view, and Sera's connection to her mind breaks. The rest of the scene she already knows. Grace checks the man by the tree and sees that he's unconscious. She calls Kalen, then calls 911. Not long after, the paramedics arrive for the man and take him to the hospital. He's weak, but he'll be okay.

consecrated

Serafíne

Some wintry night, some uncertain time - after dusk, before dawn. Hell, after dusk, before the bars in Denver have closed for the night: a text.

Or: two, to be precise.

Going out tonight.

A stutterstep later:

Come see me.

Maybe he gets them. Maybe he ignores them. Maybe he doesn't reply for weeks. These days, she never really knows.

Hawksley

Winter cannot get its head on straight. Sunny, warm days -- warm enough that even Hawksley's bitterness against the cold fades a bit -- and then snowstorms. Fickle, capricious winter. He should like it better, given everything he has in common with it.

Like coming and going without warning or notice. Like being changeable and unsteady and unreliable. Like being unconcerned with the damage it does.

Like being cold.

--

He is awake when his phone goes off. Looks at it, and ignores it, and goes on with what he's doing. In that big house of his. In that lonesome mansion-dotted neighborhood. It's quiet enough that one can hear the clock down the hall tick, tick, tick, and --

his phone vibrates again, insistently.

Hawksley's brows tug. He picks it up and flicks his finger across the screen. Two messages from Sera, a multitude of messages from someone else, five missed calls from that someone else, and a message and a voicemail he is not ignoring but not sure yet how to answer.

He reads.

She hasn't asked him to come see her in a while. Sometimes when she has, he hasn't seen it. Or at least: hasn't answered it. Sometimes for weeks.

He rubs his thumb across the insides of his fingers, a book heavy in his lap, staring, frowning. Slides his finger hither and yon, words appearing like magic. Or, well: as magic. Eventually you can define everything that way, he thinks. It annoys him, these days.

No. Come here.

Serafíne

Going out was a term of convenience. When she sent the text, she was already out, a drink in hand and maybe another one and music throbbing in the background, sitting on a barstool or maybe on the bar already, legs swinging, everything bright and warm, a bottle against her left hip so - you know - she doesn't have to bloody move, in order to refresh her drink. The evening a warm glow all around her, the rush and hum as the doors swing open and then closed and the crowd deepens and sharpens and the night moves all around, bright and dark, lovely and chaotic.

She didn't expect him to respond.

She didn't expect him to respond but he does and he doesn't say okay, he says come here and she inhales in the middle of the bar, tastes whiskey, lime and ginger, wants a cigarette, wants -

Hogwarts?

The truth is, she doesn't want to go there. She wants to be out, she wants this lovely chaos all around her, wants to feel it all pounding against her ribcage and the back of her skull, but she wants to see him more.

--

Dan might talk her out of it but he's not here or if he's here he's wrapped up with Jer (back together, ironically since Thanksgiving) and -

Okay. See you soon.

Not as soon as you'd think, mind. Takes her a little while to get a cab or maybe an Uber, takes a while to get from the wilds of Lodo to the rarified air of Cherry Hills. Takes a while for Sera to finish up her drink and settle up her tab and grab her little clutch, which is large enough to hold one credit card, her iPhone, two tabs of acid, a joint, three cigarettes, a lighter, two little blue pills and three condoms and pick up her leather jacket from the coat check and stumble out into the bright, cold air, and watch her breath steam and coalesce and duck into the yellow cab and -

well, it takes awhile.

Soon enough, though, there's a ring-through on the intercom that surely Collins answers, and authorizes the entry, and notifies his master that Miss Sera has arrived.

Hell, maybe Collins announces her.

She might like it if he did.

Hawksley

No one announces her. She calls it Hogwarts but it has no grand gates. Just the usual. She's been here before. The long drive, the garage, the normal-seeming door. A vintage-styled updated mansion, with all its dozen or so rooms and a single occupant with his ever-faithful manservant.

It's late by the time she arrives. No one talks her out of going to see Hawksley, where once no one would have thought to do so. It's not like he's dangerous, whether he has the ability to summon fire from the sky or not. It's not like he could really hurt her. Or would.

Not intentionally, one could presume.

--

She knocks or rings and Collins does not answer. The door opens and Hawksley stands there in grey slacks and a white shirt, the sleeves rolled and the collar undone and no tie, no belt, no socks, no shoes. It's cold outside. He looks the way he always does, with only stylish levels of scruff on his jaw and a cleanshaven throat, with fierce blue eyes and strong hands. He opens the door to her, and watches her as she comes in.

Serafíne

Sera in a little black dress that is sleek and sophisticated and leaning sharply against the edge of modesty seen from the front. The right flank, though, is not fabric but tapestry of open-worked metal rings, which shows - well, everything. The curve where her thigh meets her ass, the supple arc of her hipbone cut across by something black and lace. More, probably, to be revealed when she slides off her leather jacket.

Which she doesn't, not yet.

One hand, two fingers, folded through her studded silver clutch. The brass knuckle clasp worked cleverly enough that when she crosses her two fingers - as she is doing now - the effect is like that of the crow's skull tattoo on her right forearm.

She's a little bit high and a little bit drunk and a little bit something else that makes her vision haze about the edges, makes the lights wrap themselves 'round with a glowing haze. Makes every streetlight sliding past the window of the cab look like a shooting star. A little bit everything.

"Hey," she's expecting Collins, glancing away, moving her head to make the lights streak 'round her when the door opens and its Hawksley, not Collins afterall. This quick breath, her eyes on his eyes, then on his mouth. That's when she leans in, and up, to kiss him, if he lets her. Eyes closing, mouth opening, if only for a moment.

A little bit everything.

Even a little bit awkward, as the kiss ends, and she walks inside, heels clicking on his expensive parquet floors, cheeks bright from the cold, eyes bright from other things, looking around the foyer the way you do reentering a familiar place after absence. The last time she was here he carried her in, then left her alone. She took his tuxedo jacket home with her. Wore it as a fashion statement until his scent faded from the fabric, then it joined the rest of her things strewn on the big velveteen armchair beneath the huge picture windows in her room.

"I didn't know you opened your own door. Keep doing shit like that and pretty soon Collins'll be out of a fucking job. Then where would he be."

Hawksley

When has he met her, seen her, where she hasn't been a little high, a lot drunk? More often than not she's off the deep end one way or another. It's how she is what she is. Telling her she needs to cut back on any of it would be about as horrifying and small as suggesting that Hawksley set fire to his library.

He knows that.

He breathes in, deeply, his nostrils flaring as she says that off-kilter little greeting. He's surprised when she tips herself upward to kiss him, and his eyes close, and he lets her, and his lips catch her lower one for a moment, only just. Somehow, thought not in real life and only where the heart and mind intersect with magic, she can taste something bitter in that.

His eyes open when she stops, and she walks inside with her heels clicking, and he closes the door behind her, thuds the deadbolt into place.

Hawksley is quiet. And the house is quiet, and dark.

"Collins isn't here," he says. Is quiet, a moment. "Hungry?"

Serafíne

Sera does not turn to watch him as he steps behind her to shut the door, to throw the deadbolt. Her eyes are drifting through the foyer, its exits and their long shadows and she's tasting that bitterness, which is just as real as if it were real life, she's breathing around it, her shoulders back, braced.

He asks if she's hungry. Sera shakes her head: no. She's not hungry.

"You could fix me a drink, though," she responds, shifting her clutch from hand to hand as she strips off her battered leather jacket. Leaves it - somewhere.

It's an entrance hall. There's bound to be a coat tree around here.

"Where's Collins?"

Hawksley

Hawksley shrugs. "Vacation. For all I know he's in Disney World."

Serafíne

That makes her smile, quick and unbidden and strangely private, the expression. It lingers, as her gaze flicks back to him. "Don't be silly. Collins wouldn't go to Disney World. Fuck, I think he might go to butler school on vacation. To brush up on his correctness, yeah?

"Or maybe he's taking a tour of the sites of Great Naval Battles of the World."

That last bit she manages to pronounce as if all the words were capitalized.

"I didn't know you were back in town. It's good to see you."

Hawksley

Sera smiles but Hawksley doesn't join her. They're standing in the foyer: the doors to the grand ballroom, the stairs sweeping upwards.

He decides against telling her he's been here for a month. More.

"Why'd you want to see me?" he asks, after a silence.

Serafíne

That makes her stop, that just arrests her. She's not really moving because this is his home and he hasn't really moved. To invite her in or -

- and she's just becoming aware of that, just allowing it to come to the surface and it brings a flush of blood beneath her skin that isn't really visible because she's not that pale. Her pulse in her throat, though.

"What?" The first thread of disbelief - or maybe something else - flashes in her eyes. "What kind of question is that? Because we're friends. Or maybe we were friends. Because I missed you. Because I wanted you.

"What the actual fuck, Hawksley. Why'd you tell me to come?"

Hawksley

"Whoa," he says, his brow furrowing, his hands coming up, palms out towards her. He even rears back, his head if not his steps. "Jesus, Sera."

His hands lower. "I'm not jumping down your throat asking that. Calm the fuck down. You asked me to come out, I said to come over. I asked why you wanted to see me. It wasn't a fucking attack, all right?"

And his shoulders square, his brow still dark. "Unless that is why you wanted to see me. Because if you're pissed, you don't need to wait for a trigger. You can just say so."

Serafíne

Her heart's racing. Not the good kind of racing but still its racing and she can feel the way it expands and contracts in her chest. The way she breathes, sharply and suddenly, wheeling back, not precisely listening to him but watching him, the darkening brows, the bulk of his shoulders, the evening spinning out from her, pulled to its thinnest subtance.

"Shit." Sera closes her eyes. Puts a hand through her hair. Her nails are painted dark, dark red - Vampsterdam, one of her favorites - and the manicure is recent enough that there are only two or three chips. The fringe is starting to grow in and she's letting it. It has the soft, fuzzy texture of a cocker spaniel's coat, groomed for the summer heat. There's a little pincurl in front of her ear, which is stuck through with a safety pin, an oversized pewter rosebud, crossed with a bar studded with diamonds.

"I just thought you'd know. I just thought - " Sera presses her mouth together then, shakes her golden head as if to clear her throughts.

"Fuck it. Can we start over? I've got a joint. It's killer shit. We'll go out back - I'll get you high and you can tell me something.

"Anything. I don't care what."

Hawksley

"Thought I'd know what," he begins, but she's troubled, she's spiraling, and cold as he can be -- is -- he can see that. He frowns, and then he just nods. "I don't want to get high," he says, but it's quieter. He holds out his hand. "Come to the library. We'll talk. I think I owe you that much."

Serafíne

Why does that make her throat close? What the fuck doesn't she ever listen to Dan when he's bloody right?

But he offers her his hand and she takes it without thought and without question, because that's what they're supposed to do, goddamnit.

"I don't want you to owe me anything."

Hawksley

His hand still feels as warm as ever. That doesn't go away. The touch of him is still sunshine and flight, no matter what months of near-total silence and darkness have done. He can't help that. Can't turn it on and off at will, or chooses not to. But he walks with her, in his bare feet and her tottering heels, toward the library, with its eastern and western altars, its vast windows, its endless books.

When they get there, she finds candles lit here and there, and lights dimmed. A heavy book on an ottoman. A tray with two plates, both with a sandwich, neither one touched. No bottle of wine or bourbon or vodka to go with it, no glasses of chocolate milk.

He leaves the door open. And goes to sit on one of those large ottomans. She could curl up in a ball on them and sleep if she wanted. Maybe she has. Looks over at her, watching to see if she sits. Or has a sandwich.

Serafíne

They're nearly of a height as they walk, that's how ridiculously she dresses, and no matter how much the heels foreshorten her stride she still somehow contrives to make it seem masculine, at the sheer edge of badass, nothing mincing. Not even tonight, when the world feels both strange and strained and she doesn't -

she doesn't -

Just inside the door she steps out of the heels. Lucky they are Vaccarellos to match her dress, then she'd have to unbuckle her ankles. But not: just another pair of Alexander McQueens. These have dragons on the heels, and spikes all over the body, why the fuck not?

Instantly, Sera's six inches shorter.

She looks around the room. Remembers it: the altars, east and west. The way the light cuts in from the banked windows. The walls of books,

and other things.

She doesn't sit right away. They unlink hands and he goes to sit and she makes not quite a half-circuit of the room. Perhaps a quarter-circuit, inhabiting it again, familiarizing herself with its bredth and depth. Soaking in his resonance, which has permeated the walls here so that it begins to feel, somehow, emanant.

When she comes back around, she puts down her clutch and takes both a seat and half-a-sandwich

She doesn't know why.

Hawksley

Hawksley watches her. She takes off her shoes and he doesn't know what to read into that. Or why he needs to read anything into anything.

She doesn't speak when she sits. He doesn't know what she wants from him. And he doesn't know what she expects, though he guesses she'd say she doesn't expect anything.

But she does. He knows that much.

--

"My father is divorcing my mother," he says. It's not a beginning. But it is, really. It's the one he has. "She's not doing well. Getting much worse, in fact."

It occurs to him that, unless he did it and blocked it out, he's never told her what's wrong with his mother. He doesn't now. Enough that it's implied: she isn't well. She hasn't been for some time, one can easily guess.

"For a while I was looking for Alicia. Gave up when every trail seemed to end in a suicide mission."

He shrugs, shakes his head aimlessly.

"I'm..." his eyes go down, his brow furrowing, "not... good with people." Lifts his eyes again, finds hers. "I fake it fine. Believe it myself. But it never lasts."

Serafíne

She would say she doesn't expect anything.

It isn't true.

She doesn't understand that, but he's right: it isn't true. She expects something. She -

---

- puts that fucking sandwich down. She doesn't want it anyway. Why is Hawksley eating sandiwiches. Why is Collins on vacation when Hawksley needs him. Why isn't there whiskey or chocolate milk or whiskey laced chocolate milk or some medium of all of the above.

Sera takes a bite of the sandwich and then puts it down. She doesn't want a goddamned sandwich. She puts it down and she stands up then and she inhales and she crosses the space between them and she sits down: on his ottoman or maybe on his lap. If he has lap available.

"Your father's a shithead. So's mine."

Which is true. Her mother's worse, though.

Sera's mother isn't sick. She's just horrid.

"You told me once that she was in a - " Sera pauses, she doesn't know the words, she doesn't know the right words, the words themselves don't matter but some of them make her heart pause - stutter - stop - " facility. But you never told me why.

"I didn't ask, either. You don't have to tell me - "

She's so intense. The lit candles are such brilliant, liquid squiggles at the edge of her plain of vision she wants to squirm in time with them. And she thinks, absurdly and perhaps wrongly, to herself that she is so goddamned selfish -

Hawksley

His father is a shithead. Hawksley just shrugs. He's the first to say it. He's not about to disagree.

He watches her. Remembering what he has and has not told her about his mother. She says he never told her, says she didn't ask, says he doesn't have to tell, but these are ciphers for Serafine wanting to know. And he knows that. Can't tell what she thinks of herself for it.

"I know," is what he says, quietly. And he doesn't tell her.

May as well go on disappointing her, since he's already on such a roll.

Hawksley's hands press together slightly, at the fingertips. It manages to look neither academic nor prayerful. "Sera... I can't stay here."

Serafíne

The room is so familiar, but the edges are dark now in a way that only makes them emptier. Sera has slept on these ottomans, curled up. Has half-slept on these ottomans, winding up to or down from some brighter high, dark eyes half-open, forehead against the inside of her wrist, wrapped up in the colorful pattern of her bracelets, seeing world, after world, after world inside.

Once, she brought a pair oversized glasses with plain lenses and sat her silly ass rather primly down in one of the big leather armchairs. She wore a collared shirt beneath a sweater, both pastel, over a pleated madras mini-skirt: as if dressing in study-drag might make her better at the work of combing through dry-dust treatises of Hermetic scholars.

It didn't.

She took two tabs of acid. Half-an-hour later she was curled up on the ottoman again, a blanket over her face, the glasses on top of the blanket, still perched on her nose: absurd, lovely, smiling, hallucinating: intensely, intently, this great chorus of words rising from the books all around. Romantics bickering with revolutionaries. Poets and the prosaic tattooing their songs beneath her skin, and she, listening. Blissful, sad, restless, hungry, curious each by turn. When she came down, when she came back, when she complained that she couldn't understand he took her instead to his private theater and showed her I ? Huckabees. She was still tripping, but oh oh oh, she breathed in. And in and in and in. Felt her skin sliced open and the world crawling inside her, filling up her lungs, wrapping itself right-round the column of her spine and then, then, she kissed his heavy shoulder and told him that she was starting to understand, she could feel everything, everything, everything and all of it right inside her.

That was a long time ago.

--

This is now. She's come closer to him, but not as close as she'd like, and it is terrible and awkward because she wants -

she wants -

she always wants to be close, and to touch, and to be touched.

But, no. She is perched on the edge of his ottoman. Her slight weight barely depresses it. Inhales as he tells her that I know, and he tells her that quietly, and he doesn't tell her anything more.

She isn't looking at him then. She's looking away. She is in profile to him and her profile is as sharp as ever. The prominent nose. The delicate jaw, spare beneath her skin. Everything not essential burned away. The fine little mouth, quick and sure, half-open, inhaling.

Breathing in. Out.

Glances back a moment later, this heavily lashed look that snags on his hands, lingers on the press of his fingers, together, whorls and whorls. Then higher: this darting look at his raptor's gaze.

Then away.

Somewhere off in the wings. In the shadows of the room, beyond the uncertain smear of the candlelight. Her mouth closes, and then her eyes. She drops her chin to her chest. Turned away like this, he has only the view of her fringe, her rather elfin ear bristling with hardware, all the adornments pierced through her skin. The slope of her cheekbone, the faint depression at her temple and the pulse, beating there.

The hint of her black triangle tattoo, just visible beneath and behind her left ear.

Doesn't say anything, then, Sera.

Not a goddamned word.

Hawksley

To Hawksley's eyes, everything here is lit up. Every corner. Every nook and cranny. Every book could be read by candlelight as easily as in the height of a summer's day. This is how he sees things, most times. He does not forget to turn on lights, doing so by habit, but he believes so much in the sun he feels that perhaps, for him, shadows are banished.

He remembers Sera in her little studying getup. Turned him on. Distracted him, even from his insatiable hunger for the books themselves. He still hasn't read them all. No wonder he spends so much time in here. Stroked her hair when she got high. Listened to complaints and shrugged and suggested maybe it wasn't solely about understanding it all. Asked her if she wanted to watch a movie instead.

Good little movie. And she felt like she understood, and it seemed to make her happy, and that made him happy, and he could still feel these interconnected things

and they only made him withdraw from her more.

--

Hawksley does know her. And understands her, at least: enough. Knows it must hurt when he gives her no more. Trusts her with no more, or however it seems to her. It's a burden, though. It's a weight he shares with one other person, and with Collins, he didn't really have a choice. Collins just saw, and knew, and there was no avoiding it. With Sera, he has the option. He doesn't have to tell her. He can keep her -- who is so sensitive, who is so softhearted, so gentle no matter how many spikes she wears or how bladelike her grins can be -- from some other thing, sad and unassailable.

And truth be told, he can keep it for himself. He knows if shared, it would diminish. It would be easier to bear, perhaps. Sympathy, understanding, et cetera. And maybe he has ready too many books from ages that don't belong to this world anymore, but he rather thinks that would be a copout.

Still: his brow tugs a bit, because he knows he hurts her.

--

It isn't just the silence. Or the withholding. It's the way he's been gone for months now. Not gone, but -- not with her. Not the way they were, so close that people didn't expect to see one of them without the other. So close that all the light in him seemed to hit her and shatter into facets, prisms, not as concentrated but far-flung and colorful. So close that she forgave him, and kept forgiving him, and perhaps would go right on forgiving him if he gave her just enough to survive on. Crumbs. Drip-feeding.

He thinks, looking at her, how stupid it is to be what they are. How lonesome. Every path to Ascension so singular, every Seeking undertaken alone. They still try these things: councils and coteries, covens and cabals. They keep up the pretense of Traditions but that's really just about style and occasionally a half-ignored code of ethics when in the end, they are all individuals. Would never have awakened if they weren't.

They still try to have lovers, and love, and family. They make pets of their loved ones, trying to be accepted by those who can never really understand. Those who, once they do understand, will break off onto their own path, just as narrow, just as isolated.

Sometimes he thinks that past a certain horizon, all these paths return to one another, but by then, it doesn't matter if you have a name like Sera or Hawksley or what you were in this life. There is something beyond these limitations. There is no question of rejection because everything is one, and everything is love, and he would never write such a hippy-dippy thing down in any of his journals but sometimes he lets himself think it, even though

thinking about it doesn't mean much when it still gives him a migraine every time he fucking levitates or sets something in fire. He's still physical. Still Hawksley. Still bound by the ideas of an entity who looks like the god Horus and calls to mind creatures who were once terrible lizards and now are tiny and have wings and live in domed cages and sing little songs. He's still got sensation, and lusts, and appetites, and is sad when the girl he loves is sad because of him and thinks he can do something decent by never telling her that he loves her and, quite decidedly, removing himself.

Given what he knows of his ability to compromise, commit, and care for others, and given what he thinks of his eventual destiny, maybe he is.

Or maybe he's just a coward.

--

Sera doesn't speak, but Hawksley does.

"I tried to make my mother a consor," he says. It is the simplest, shortest form of the story. "She went insane. And now my father is cutting her off."

All short, brutal wounds, these sentences.

"I have to take care of her, Sera," Hawksley says, less brutal, less simple. Quieter, too. He wasn't going to tell her a god damn thing. His brows are tight together. "She can't come here. She has a routine. She has... friends, at least, who visit her. And most of the time, she's perfectly lucid. But if he's abandoning her, I need to be there.

"I owe a lot to a lot of people. But no one more than her."

Almost, he reaches for her. Thinks better of it.

"Nothing's forever, Sera," he tells her. He says: to the Disciple of Time.

Serafíne

Rather a long time ago, not long after they met, Hawksley saw something in Sera that few others have seen: this capacity to work as much from pain as from the pleasure she seeks so thoroughly and so assiduously. That is part of what she does in that moment of silence, when she drops her chin and looks away. Just: gives herself over to it. Lives within that which she usually ignores, defers, turns away from, forgets. Even when she has: remembered. And she has, though he doesn't know it, done all the work of memory, found herself in a mirror, pulled herself right through, not precisely like Alice but -

Her left hand trembles, once. She tucks her right thumb into her fist. She doesn't know what he is thinking, what he has resolved, the flights of fancy he would never write in his journal.

--

And he tells her what he does and her dark eyes open and there is a quiet set to her jaw - evident from the spasm of some tendon across her cheek - that eases, yes, but does not pass.

Nothing's forever, he tells her, which is true. Everything's forever: she might say, is also true, and both are false, in equal measure. What the hell. They're magick: certainly their minds are capable of expanding to confront these smaller paradoxes.

"That tells me a helluva lot about why you have to go," tight-voiced, this. "and about why you've been so damn far away, and not a goddamned thing about why you're acting like we're never going to see each other again. Like you never wanna see me again.

"Contrary to what is apparently a popular fucking opinion, I am completely capable of buying a ticket and getting on a flight and to my destination without packing a hatbox full of pharmaceuticals and waving it front of the drug-sniffing dogs and getting my ass arrested. You'll go, I'll come see you sometimes.

"Fuck. Maybe I'll learn to teleport. Though probably a flight would take less time than the ritual to do it right. I don't understand what's wrong - "

Hawksley

Hawksley's already frowning when she speaks, though it's for his own reasons. Worry for his mother. Shame. The way his life is changing, and not in a way he would have chosen. But as Sera speaks to him, clearly upset, his frown changes.

"I'm not," he says, a bit flat. "Where are you even getting that?" he asks, baffled. "No one's stopping you from visiting, Sera, and I certainly didn't imply -- any of the things you're so upset about."

That frown of his, nearly a scowl, doesn't abate. Voice quiets a bit, though. "I'd love it if you visited, Sera. I just want you to know what to expect. My life isn't going to be same as it is now. I'm not going to be able to be the same. I can't take off around the world or go on a head-trip at a moment's notice anymore. That routine of hers I talked about? I need to be a part of that now. I can't even --"

Frustration blooms in his features, makes him look away, his eyes fierce. "Do you get what this means for my own path? How much it's going to slow me down? My life just took a swan dive and your first thought is that I don't want to ever see you again? Jesus, Sera! Where do you even get that?"

Serafíne

Sera is still wearing the bronze ring he gave her a year ago, along with an armful of so-bright paste-and-mirror bracelets from Morocco and enough golden Tahitian pearls from a shop on the Rue de Rivoli that she could wrap them twice, maybe three times around her neck. The pearls rarely come out, the Moroccan bracelets have started to peel apart. Lose bits of their mirrors, the tiny little beads embedded between the metal curlicues and cheap enameling. She still mixes them in with her spikes and bicycle chains, her leather and lace, here and there. Not tonight but: often.

The bronze ring though, she is rarely without. She wears it on her right index finger and rubs it with the meat of her right thumb when she feels anxious, or upset and doesn't really understand what she's doing. It's just a little habit, the movement and the metal, warm from her skin.

She's doing that now.

Because: oh -

oh - a low flush beneath her skin, hardly visible though she feels it the way she feels her first drink of the night, except right now she's abashed rather than celebratory. Listens and watches him in profile and then brings her right hand to her mouth, knuckles against her lips, still rubbing the band of that little ring.

"Fuck. I'm sorry - I just thought - I'm sorry. I guess I took that space between us and filled it with my own shit instead of remembering it was yours, too. I shouldn't have - I should've -

"Realized that it wasn't all about me."

Hawksley

Still frowning. Has been frowning for minutes on end now. Softens, though. The color in her skin. Sees the ring she's wearing when she puts her hand up by her mouth.

"I'm sorry, too," he says, quietly. He who seldom, rarely, pretty much never apologizes for anything, to anyone. "I'm sorry for -- the space between us." His voice is low. Naturally, normally, as warm as anything else about him. First time he's really truly acknowledged that the space is there. That it isn't just that he's been going to and from New England, that he's been shutting her out.

He holds out his hand. "Hand me that ring."

Serafíne

Hawklsey apologizes and Sera nods, mute, mouth rocking neatly over her still fist. She is: rather immediately teary-eyed, though not a tear is actually shed. Just the gleam of them amongst her dark lashes, this bright counterpoint to her heavy eye liner.

Her expression is so spare and her mind is both everywhere and also: here, contemplating the half-hidden mysteries of the human heart. The deep strangeness of separation, and also the way we tunnel through it. He was out there the whole time he was gone from her, individual and singular, which - in turn - makes her want to cry, though somehow the want matters far more than the tears.

He asks for her ring. She is wearing others but she knows the one he means, tucks her arms against her body and drops her hand from her mouth. Remembers, suddenly, the insight she had about him the night he first came to her in her garden.

"I know someone in London," her eyes drop from his profile to her own hand, "Who has keys to the British Museum, and the Victoria & Albert. Well," halt, correction, the fleeting edge of a small smile. "access, after hours. Could probably set you up with access, too. All that shit the Brits stole from Egypt and Greece.

"London's only six hours from the East Coast. I'll put you in touch with him. Wouldn't be the same as Egypt, but - whenever you had a day or two, you could go."

Leave at noon. Spend all night with the Rosetta stone. Be back in time for afternoon tea. Nothing close to the freedom he has enjoyed, until now. But something. Something.

Her short nails are painted a deep red-black, already starting to chip. She is honestly kinda reluctant to give it up even for a minute but: Hand me that ring says Hawksley, and Sera: Sera puts the ring in the palm of his hand.

Hawksley

She knows someone in London. Hawksley looks at her when she says that, touched and strangely aching. It's about the kindness, really. The way she forgives everyone so easily. He doesn't always like that about her. It's not something he does, or is capable of doing, or particularly wants to do. But turned on him, given to him, it breaks him a little.

This is, of course, part of why he has stayed away from her.

He allows the corner of his mouth to tug outward as she amends herself: not keys. but access. Truthfully, he could get in if he wanted to. There are things he can do, things they can all do. But he has no intention of stealing from the British Museum, which is what would prompt him to use his own talents and versions of access.

Still: this is what his life is becoming. And Sera, indomitable as ever, is thinking of ways that it doesn't have to derail him. Shatter him. Ruin him. Truthfully, though Collins serves and Collins is loyal, Sera is the only person who is doing this. And Hawksley wants to thank her, but... seems paltry, to him, to put into words.

Not often he feels that way about words. Usually they elevate.

--

Sera takes the ring he gave her, that little bronze thing that is older than one would imagine, and she sets it in his palm.

Hawksley closes his hand around it, protectively, and looks at her. He does not say anything. He looks into her eyes, and he considers her mouth, and really, he just... stares at her. It is not memorizing or studying. It is basking. And as he does, there seems to be -- to her eyes, at least, her ever-attuned eyes -- a faint glow to his aura, a thin ribbon of golden light. It is warm and soft and familiar, and it is for a moment an expression of emotion that he is not saying aloud.

A few moments pass this way. And he open his palm again. The ring carries that self-same aura for a moment, before it all fades, as the magic in him returns to him, as the working -- whatever it was -- hides behind the veil of mundanity again.

When she takes the ring back, it is warm. Not from her flesh, where she wears it. Nor from his, though his hands are always warm. It isn't until she puts it back on that it becomes clear what sort of warmth that is, what sort of feeling. It lifts. It makes that hand feel somehow lighter than the other. It's filled with resonance, consecrated to Hawksley himself. A piece of him, of his soul, given to the object.

Given to her.

Sun-drenched. Soaring.

He watches her as she dons the ring again. He knows her: he knows she can feel it, knows she will know what he's done.

"You may need to remove it," he says quietly, "if you're trying to perform a spell that goes contrary to its..."

his

"resonance." His brow furrows. "And if it pains you, I'll undo it now. I just thought..."

He doesn't know what he thought.

Serafíne

She knows someone in London.

Later, perhaps much later, maybe weeks maybe months maybe hours, she'll tell him about Claire. Claire who loved the Victoria and Albert and snuck her in, after hours, and Sera stoned - literally tripping, her senses so far flung, hallucinations creeping through every edge and every fiber. The marble statues of naked dudes lifting columns and throwing frisbees ("I know they called them fucking discuses but they're so serious and naked about those fucking frisbees.") the sarcophagi laid out in rooms. The way the space both deepened and softened the echo of their laughter. Marble chill beneath her fingertips, all the plaster casts of the great courts of the world, each new room like a new waystation in some strange journey to the underworld and back, making out in the dark hallways in between until they were breathless. All the lovely, lovely pieces of her life that she allowed herself to forget for so long, because of what came before,

and what came after.

The truth is: she forgives him, she forgives everyone so thoroughly, so entirely, so that she can learn, somehow, to forgive herself.

--

She is aware of him as he studies her. Suddenly, sharply in a way that makes her feel strange: exposed and adored, seen - briefly and entirely - and therefore somehow human, aching, vulnerable. She remembers his thumb against her cheek, his hand in her hand, his breath hot against her ear. Closes her mouth.

Lifts her sharp little chin.

Looks at him.

Sees -

- so very much, really. It pulls the fibers of the muscle of her heart right apart when he starts to Work. Which means, you know: a few tears. She sniffs, once. She can't fucking help it and she reaches up to dash them away and she sees that light, and realizes, just knows - its weird this, really - that god she loves magic. The world made strange, vulnerable, malleable, plastic. The world reshaped by their hands.

When she takes the ring back, she does know what he has done. Of course, of course. Feels it when she takes it back and slides it on to her right index finger - the soaring warmth, the endless uplift. God it takes her breath away. She makes a pleased little fist as that sensation shivers up her arm.

He doesn't really have to trail off because she kind of interrupts: stands up and comes around the edge of the ottoman, her small frame blocked against his - paralleled. "You thought right."

Drops her mouth to his temple, her nose in his hair and her hands too, splayed open. Sera just - inhales him.

Somehow that gesture feels more intimate than sex.

--

"You know that movie Cinderella?" Sera fucking non-sequiturs, just then, her mouth moving warm against his temple because she hasn't really let go. He can feel her though: the curve of her supple, threading and yes-maybe-sad little smile.

Hawksley

And then there she is. He leans back, spine straightening, looking up at her. His mouth tugs at the corner at what she says. And his eyes close when she leans over him, breathes him in.

Like this, for a moment.

Cinderella?

"The cartoon?" he asks, and she can hear his bewilderment echoing in his skull where she holds him.

Serafíne

"Feels like one of those pervy bluebirds who are always flying around and picking up her shit, getting her dressed and undressed is just tugging my hand - up, up, up." Sera lifts her chin, just high enough to cut a slantward glance down at him, her eyes hooded, the pinpoint glossiness of her unshed tears hidden from him by the angle.

She's smiling, Sera. This faint, crescent curve. "Bet it'll feel fucking amazing when I play the guitar."

Even if it pains her sometimes, too.

Quiet, forward then, her voice a rough hewn jewel of a thing:

"Am I invited to stay the night?"

Hawksley

To this, all Hawksley can do is choke a small laugh. He huffs it out, muttering: "Pervy?" but he's standing up, putting his hands on her waist even as he says so. Rises until he is looking down at her, head tipped.

His brow wrinkles at her question, though. "You're always welcome here, Sera," he tells her. "I'm keeping the house for now. Don't see why you shouldn't drop by even if I'm not here."

Serafíne

"Pervy," she affirms, mouth quirking - pleased - when he laughs, that he laughs. "I mean I'm pretty much up for anything but I'd get fucking weirded out if songbirds started taking that much interest in what the fuck I'm wearing."

That quirk sharpens as he stands and she's tipping her head back back back to following the elegant unfolding of his rather remarkable frame. Mostly, her eyes are on his eyes, but he reaches for her waist and her eyes tick downward: his mouth, his shoulder, his shadow over her. He has: cool silk jersey beneath one hand, cool metal rings beneath the other, fine and finer. She gives the band of that bronze ring a thoughtless little rub with the edge of her right thumb and raises both her arms to settle them around his shoulders.

"That's not really what I mean, but thank you. You gonna leave the Porsche too? Give Dan the keys so he can drive me around in the style to which I've become accustomed."

Her breathing has sharpened with his proximity. There are still tears in her eyes but what the hell: she cries so easily, so wantonly. Quite the same way she does everything else.

Hawksley

Hawksley just shakes his head. Pervy birds. He thinks she's a liar: she'd love being attended by little birds putting her clothes on for her. She'd think she was high as a kite, of course, but secretly: he thinks she'd adore it.

His mouth twists in a wry smirk though. "The Porsche is being sold," he says. "Though: I know the owner. I'm sure I could get you a discount if you wanted to make an offer. Don't even ask about the Jaguar, though; that's going to New England with me."

Hawksley lifts a hand, cradling the back of her head. "Let's go eat some dinner. I'll get delivery from that Thai place you like. We'll talk about things other than my impending abandonment."