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.
HawksleyWinter 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.
SerafíneGoing 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.
HawksleyNo 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.
SerafíneSera 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."
HawksleyWhen 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?"
SerafíneSera 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?"
HawksleyHawksley shrugs. "Vacation. For all I know he's in Disney World."
SerafíneThat 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."
HawksleySera 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.
SerafíneThat 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."
SerafíneHer 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."
SerafíneWhy 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."
HawksleyHis 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.
SerafíneThey'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.
HawksleyHawksley 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."
SerafíneShe 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 -
HawksleyHis 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."
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