Steel
There is goes. The last of the effect torn away, but why the fuck for? All she’d been doing was fucking feeding the fucking ducks.
Time to vanish. It wasn’t her finest work. It was rushed and unsubtle, but hopefully enough. Enough to mask her physical form for long enough to get away from that bloody woman. Enough to make herself hard to find again.
Hopefully enough.
[Dex+Stealth. +2 from Dark Streets, +3 from Arcane.]
Dice: 12 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 9) ( success x 4 )
Steel
[Gee, thanks. Nice roll.]
Serafíne
The effect pulls away and the resonance is new and the resonance is fading and the owner of that resonance is disappearing, Running. That much she can sense.
Steel finds the shadows of the park, thickens them. Cuts past picnickers and bike-riding and drunk kids and latenight joggers, breath harsh in her throat.
No one follows.
She makes her escape, or seems to.
SamirObvious from the way she puts her sparse frame in front of his that she's trying to protect him. Obvious from the way she subsumes and throws herself into the Working at once that she knows what she's doing. Obvious from the way she comes undone from the Tellurian for a moment that she has power in her pattern.
He is not a hero. He has no desire to be nor would he ever pass for one. The young man lets her do what it is she seeks to do and he keeps his eyes open lest a swarm of agents come out of the treeline towards them. Some other unknown that he can fight sure but Samir is not a fighter. Not a physical one anyway.
So she needs the contact to cast. So he trusts her if only for a moment.
And then he sees for the first time the woman who has tried all this time to stay hidden. Sees her ball up her fists and prepare to fight. He draws a breath into his lungs but Sera doesn't need to notice. A shadowy piercing person pierces the shadows and it isn't until she's gone that Samir realizes he's been holding the breath he bolstered.
"Fuck," he says when she's gone. Dazed by Sera's resonance perhaps or the fear lurking just beyond his periphery.
Is he still shushing? Other than that he stays shushed. Just because she's gone doesn't mean it's passed.
SerafíneThe creature lets him go then. Too far gone to understand that inside or beneath or around the contact is not something he would invite: she's just so easily invasive like that. Weeds, you know? They need something to grow on.
But let him go she does, and she takes a couple of steps forward on the path, free now: agent or radical, drops the mostly-empty bottle of champagne from nerveless fingers and it, heavy bottomed, falls and does not shatter.
Dark eyes flick to the movement, the creature moving, now, running. Hard to tell if she sees the balled up fists, the readiness to fight but she herself is caught on this livewire between fear and exultation. The power, see? The Working is a kind of coursing, eviscerating pleasure all its own.
Breathing hard, harshly. She follows that trail of movement then closes her eyes and lifts her face toward the sky. Her own hands-into-fists now.
"I'm just gonna - " flex and open, close again, sharper. Blunt nails painful and deliberate in the meat of her palm. Hard to talk because there are so many threads she needs to follow, so many places her mind could be. " - make sure there's no else one watching - "
(Hmmm. Correspondence 2 / Prime 1 / Entry 1 / Mind 2 maybe? ARE WE BEING WATCHED/MONITORED/STALKED MAGICALLY? AKA ANYONE OUT THERE. Coincidental. Dif 5. -1 for taking time, -1 for focus.)
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )
SamirNow that he has both of his arms free Samir doesn't choose to use his freedom to escape. From where he's standing they're in no immediate danger but he's been standing in the wrong place before. Maybe that woman was just one of them. Maybe she was a harbinger of something else. He has no idea.
Sera starts to flex her hands and casts a complicated effect and Samir pulls from his pocket a device that looks like a small handheld gaming console. Or a chunky prototype computer tablet. Something that can fit in the inside pocket of his jacket but is too bulky to appeal to the 21st-century consumer.
He taps a couple of buttons and swipes his fingers across the display.
[Corr/Forces/Matter/Prime 1 scan: ANY TECHS OUT THERE. -1 diff for focus. WP bc Initiate.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (1, 2) ( success x 1 ) [WP]
SerafíneThere are strangers all around but the park is pretty quiet. Traffic framing it yes but the stage is empty and the greenspace dampens and absorbs sound. Hardly anyone notices them in an explicit and overt way, except for the way that strangers always notice Sera. Perhaps more precisely, no one really notices anything stranger than a half-dressed drunk girl lifting her face to the sky and flexing her fine little fingers and dropping her bottle and maybe getting ready to howl at the moon.
--
No howling.
She doesn't need to howl.
Everything is nothing and nothing is one. What the fuck does it matter if she howls or not? The moon is the sun is the breath in her lungs and her spine is incised see: open, beginning to spread, this kind of pointillist pancake that she is both holding open and noodling through, following the points of dissonance, the quickenings, the chancy bits, the rumbles of intention, feeling for the little loose tooth that leads to the full-on rotten/rotting core.
Samir behind her starting right: so alien from her Work. The angular symmetry of machine language against the organic muck of her alignment: open, open, open.
Breathe, breathe, breathe.
The wind has died down.
She says nothing.
Can't really talk now, anyway.
(Extending! Dif +1)
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (4, 5, 7) ( success x 3 )
Serafíne(And one more time.)
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (5, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Samir[extending for shits and/or giggles. +1 diff. not spending WP this time.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (4, 5) ( success x 2 )
SamirIf anything had happened to them the device Sam pulls out of his jacket would have been recording it. Or at least it would have been recording the auditory proof of what happened. In the event of his death no one will be able to make sense of what's on the damned thing but he's found it helpful for figuring out what the fuck happened in the aftermath of an attack or an episode of suspended disbelief.
This is not one of those episodes. They have a run-in with someone who does not want people to run into her and Sera undoes what she had done and Sam confirms that there are in fact no devices in the area of a magical or technocratic nature that are watching them.
He would be of no use if they wanted to know of any incoming spirits or lifeforms but he's still young and he's still honing his craft. If he were a powerful entity capable of doing everything his mind could imagine doing this would be a different sort of story.
At any rate he's satisfied that no one is spying on them. He keeps the device in his hand for now. His eyes rest on Serafíne and he sets his lips into a straight line concerned but uncertain. Just watching her for the moment. He doesn't know her or her limits or even what it is she just did. So he watches.
SerafíneThe strange girl is coming down, and it is like coming down: the reassertion of the ordinary world, accompanied by a compartmentalized awareness of, perhaps even fascination with, the sensation of it. Exits, somehow, the limitless intoxication of the Work, though Samir can still feel the thrum of it in the air around her. Background noise, right? Maybe background radiation, the dark rich glow of it from the center of the ever-expanding universe.
"Fuck," is the first thing she says, with this quick-tight-smile that seems more present than absent. She is: smoothing her fine hands over her bare thighs, flexing her fingers, turning to watch the darkness where The Stranger pulled the shadows over her and made her escape. Her own eyes are dark; color gets lost in shadows and only depth and tone have meaning now, and they flicker from that path through the darkness back to the strange young man, with the weird little toy, from which she can almost taste the 3s and 4s or 1s and 0s or whatever the fuck it is he plays with, when he plays with the gut-fibers of the universe, the strings and the sinews. To the young man and back again, staccato glance like a hip-check. "I guess it was just the one. We should still get out of here, though. I'm starving anyway. Give me a ride?"
SamirHis brows flick up when the strange young woman with the fucking champagne bottle and the almost animal affair with the world asks for a ride. Can practically feel the alcohol come off her or the cocaine or the whatever it was she was enjoying before just the one threw herself into their paths.
She was just feeding the ducks. They don't know that. Up until Serafíne grabbed his arm Samir had no idea anything was even amiss.
As he pockets the device he starts to close the distance between them. Slow like he's just now realizing he maybe shouldn't trust her. Slow like he isn't sure about this. Pocketing and closing as he speaks.
"I, ah... I don't drive. I can..." He clears his throat and adjusts the fall of his jacket now that the weight's returned to it. Is he abreast of her now? He stops walking looks over at her. "I can walk you. Though."
SerafíneHmmph. That's the noise she makes, and it sounds like a word, it sounds like an answer to a question, it sounds like it was formed from phonemes, from word-pieces, and made-to-be, for all it is just a kind of sublingual (beneath the tongue) vocalization, some contraction of diaphragm and vocal cords. Flicks a glance that takes-him-in in a way that people are not used to being taken-in, sharp little thing, looking up the way she always has to do when she is barefoot.
Somehow in your mind though she's looking down, a half-moon glance above a crescent-curve smile.
"Play around with that thing and you don't fucking drive?" This thread of laughter, which is still braided with darker shreds - that moment of her awareness, that echo of her fear he must've felt when she was close, when the moment coalesced and the world quickened and time started to do that strange little waltz it always does when adrenaline spikes the blood and Something Wicked (Or At Least a Little Weird) This Way Comes. Still laughter now, because she is given to it, wanton with it, inhaling around it. "Okay, Sport. You can walk me."
Another inhale, closing her eyes, as she looks Down The Path as if staring toward the horizon or willing the world to stop wiggling so fucking much!
"I lost my shoes though. Let's cut across the grass."
SamirThough he frowns at the rhetorical Samir doesn't take or make the time to answer it. He chews his lower lip and tucks his hands into the pockets of his trousers and weathers her laughter. Not the first party girl he's ever been around.
Hard to tell if he's the sort of guy to indulge in the shit she caught him shucking a couple weekends ago by looking at him. His hair is long and his build is slight but hasn't she known plenty of guys who met both descriptions and didn't touch the stuff. Maybe he doesn't indulge but he doesn't look like he's celibate. They don't know each other. For all he knows she's high off magick and not off medicinals.
She wants to cut across the grass. He follows her.
"Do you wanna... I dunno, find your shoes? It's... you know, it's dark, you could step on a needle or something."
Serafíne"Naw, Sport." Oh, look who has a name. Hard to tell if she's being ironic, or provocative, or if she's just fucked up and watched a remake of the Great Gatsby recently, or if she doesn't quite realize she's repeating herself. But she's also moving, you know? Silver hotpants framing her ass, long (she's so slight but still somehow she seems long) legs moving quick and sure and fine, the bunch and slide of muscle visible in her thighs.
"I don't wanna. Too many people here and what if she comes back? With friends."
Shakes her head and turns and keeps-on-going, dark and pale and dark again, and being led across the lawn, through the blankets and strangers and picnickers, the evening's remnants of the day's work, the slow-sighing-slide into summer darkness is like being through a field of semi-conscious, semi-conductive statues by a mad nymph, all doorways and innuendos.
"I'll buy some on the way. I know a place. Or a guy? I fucking forget which. Hey, stay close okay? I'm going to cover our trail."
SerafíneCorr 2 / Time 2. Difficulty 5? -1 taking time, -1 focus, +1 (I think that HIDING HER ASS is opposed to sera's resonance? am I wrong?)
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 2, 9) ( success x 1 )
SamirNotice how he isn't worried about his own feet which are not bare. They are quite the opposite of bare. He's wearing Doc Martens that look black in the dark but are actually a blood-red and they are thick-soled and would protect him against everything but the most caustic of substances and yet he still thinks about little Serafíne's soles.
Without shoes she is little. He remembers her being quite a bit taller when they first met. She's only a few inches taller but a few inches matter sometimes. It doesn't make her any less. Now he has no doubt she could do him serious harm from across a crowded room if she got it in her head to do so.
Never mind what's going on in his own head.
She tells him to stay close and Samir startles like she'd lost him somewhere. No urgency in her voice but she had started rambling and he had stopped listening. He doesn't grab onto her or get close into her space but he does heed her. He at least keeps up with her.
"Okay," he says. He wants to keep chewing his lip but she's knocked that right out of him. Now he's paying attention.
SerafíneHe says okay and he Keeps Up and he says nothing else and as he comes alongside her she turns her golden head and gives him this smile that edges on the beatific or maybe merely the indulgent, the approving, dare-we-say-it even the maternal: sudden, approving.
"I want chili cheese fries." The creature non-sequitors. "And a fucking gin and tonic."
They've reached the sidewalk now, and are leaving the park, waiting at the crosswalk for the little green NO NO NO NO GO hand to change to YES YES YES YES YES WALK MOTHERFUCKER WALK hand she likes so much so: stillness for a moment. Some SUV whizzes past and there's the electric hum in the stoplight. Across the street, the luminous array of lights from the bars, shops, galleries open late for a Final Friday.
Sera smells like sweat, and patchouli, and hashish. Mmmm.
She keeps Working, too.
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 7) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Samir"There's a place on the corner of, ah..."
He doesn't have to bust out his strange little device for this. One of the perks of knowing a Virtual Adept or a Mercurial Elite or whatever the fuck they're calling themselves these days is that even without having to break out their computers they tend to have a good idea of the surrounding area after a small amount of time.
Paranoia helps. Not knowing how to cook without setting off the smoke detector also helps.
"Vine, I think. They have a cheese fry option on the menu and you can add chili to... you know, burgers and stuff. It's probably ten minutes from here. There's another place if we go down Josephine, Wyman's? I hear they have pizza. But I've never been inside, so..."
Is she making him nervous? Aw.
SerafíneThis glimpse at his profile. Not a particular present glimpse or a pregnant glimpse because within or beneath or above the fucked-up-ness the back of her mind is all in knots. What she is doing feels shredding/scrubbing their path, peeling the fibers of it away from the ordinary movement of time and tide, pulling other pieces back over it, this pregnant, hallucinatory awareness of the two of them like the rocky core of a comet. Their recent history, the glowing trail she dampens and scrubs and hides.
It's hard.
It makes her head hurt.
It makes her feel slightly less fucked-up even if fucked-up is a necessary precursor to those sort of peeling-apart and peeling-away and that also hurts. "Pizza sounds better than burgers to me. Do you think they have fries there?"
Oh, lo! The light has changed. She doesn't so much reach out for/to him as she brushes past him. Physically, yeah? Should-bump and hip-check, bare feet on the hot asphalt, the two of them briefly all-lit-up by the headlights of the cars stopped at the red light, that smearing glow.
(And, extending.)
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Samir[i'm gonna have him roll empathy for the old S&G. specialty prob doesn't apply, this is your standard "we're socializing, aw fuck" roll.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 6) ( success x 2 )
Samir[I'm going to kill all of you. GO PLAY.]
SerafíneWhat he has immediately is: No You Are Not Annoying The Shit Out of Her by Talking Too Much Samir and also, there is so much going on with her. The tangled hint of both difficulty and determination that overlays her Work. The backwash awareness, caution, a sharp edge of something noxious and remembered and old. Hints of chaos, hurtling pleasures, will for days, old fucking wounds. Which is, in some ways, the same-old-same-old that you get when you take the time to look at a person, closely, who feels things, deeply. If even, only for a moment.
There is another immediate thing, too. That store over there sells shoes.
She likes her some fucking shoes.
SerafíneWhat he has immediately is: No You Are Not Annoying The Shit Out of Her by Talking Too Much Samir and also, there is so much going on with her. The tangled hint of both difficulty and determination that overlays her Work. The backwash awareness, caution, a sharp edge of something noxious and remembered and old. Hints of chaos, hurtling pleasures, will for days, old fucking wounds. Which is, in some ways, the same-old-same-old that you get when you take the time to look at a person, closely, who feels things, deeply. If even, only for a moment.
There is another immediate thing, too. That store over there sells shoes.
She likes her some fucking shoes.
Samir"Where there's burgers, there's fries."
He raises his inflection a bit at the end as one tends to do when one is mustering enthusiasm in the hopes of it rubbing off on the other person. Or maybe on himself. A fake it until you make it sort of a tone. If Serafíne hasn't gotten the impression that this young man enjoys adventure and striking off into the night with people he's just met that's because he is not that sort of young man.
Then he drops back into his normal tone of voice. Fishes around in an exterior pocket for his cellphone. It does not look as conspicuous as the device he used to stab at their surroundings earlier. It can help him focus his magick but that's not what anyone ever imagined it would do when they designed it.
It does hook up to unsecured WiFi connections quick and nice though.
"I can check. I don't like assuming, you know? Then we'd get there and they wouldn't have fries and I'm just gonna ask the Internet."
And he can walk and talk at the same time. She brushes past him and he continues on along as if they just happen to be going the same place. If she gets too far ahead of him she's liable to forget he's even there.
He's cute and all but he can't compete with a pair of studded stiletto whatever-the-fucks in the storefront window coming up on their right.
Serafíne(And extending! so that she can finish and I can move on from this.)
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (4, 6, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
SerafíneThere.
There.
They get to the other side of the street and whatever it was tying her head into knots and making her shoulders tense and sort of burning in the air or maybe not the air so much as the ether, the OtherSpace the third eye sees, not the first two, is done. Some finality to it. She is going one-two steps up the depression in the sidewalk for wheelchairs and strollers, nobby little rubber bulbs for traction underfoot, turning around as he walks beside her but no, she's not forgetting, not now, not yet.
Glances at his profile then looks back behind them, the glow of the park. Music starting up again as the new band climbs onto the mini clamshell stage. Strangers and their cell phones like fireflies against the horizon.
All that strange, distant glow.
Their walk through dampened, distorted. The history of it not so much erased as it was: hidden, in plain sight.
And Sera, her prescience and her presence returning: sudden, sharper.
Samir is going to ask the Internet. Sera does not tell him that he doesn't have to, she's going to eat whatever there is wherever they go. That's how tonight will be. She does not tell him because he wants to ask the internet. Undermining that geeky little desire would be Rude.
Ask away, man. ask away.
--
"Oh hey." On the other side of the street, they pass a picture window with the usual mixture of dominatrix gear and art pieces and black light posters and hippie bullshit of a late-Friday-night boutique where a girl like Sera might buy shoes on the fly.
"Let's go in here."
SamirIn profile he is soft and studious. Anxious underneath it all. He doesn't give the glow of his screen his full attention. He looks young from this angle but not younger than he actually is.
Maybe she can tell from looking at him that Sam isn't used to people looking at him.
That store doesn't have anything in it that would appeal to a guy like Samir. Not in any respect other than morbid curiosity. Something he might click on while he's killing time waiting for a download to finish or a contact to answer his email. Or maybe it would. He dresses with the sort of punk-grunge aesthetic that is starting to make a comeback among youth their age.
Oh hey.
Samir looks up from his thumb-tapping eyebrows aloft startling with the presence of another pedestrian nearer than he thought he was and steps out of the flow of foot traffic to attend to her.
"Alright," he says. Playing at easiness. His heart is hammering in his chest and he's chewing his lower lip when he isn't talking but getting out of the house is supposed to be good for you right.
A final glance at his phone. "They do have fries. And a bunch of other stuff. Right on." Away it goes into his pocket and he tucks his hands away and goes with Serafíne off to the boutique. Looks about as enthused as he would be following her into a mud pit. He's got to be a hit at parties.
SerafíneThe store's empty except for the girl behind the counter, the hum of the air conditioning bright and a background of alt-rave-rap or whatever. She's older than both of them but doesn't really look it, except for the way she has settled into her body, knows it, moves it in. Glances up when strangers come in and gives them both an assessing look and Samir a sympathetic enough grimace.
Takes not of Sera's bare-feet and evident inebriation. Enough to make her sway. Not enough to make her stumble.
"Hey. Let me know if you guys need anything."
Maybe Samir says Right On or something too. Sera gave him a lashed glance and a strange little smile the first time he said it. You know, she's sympathetic. Empathetic. She likes people, and not just where they are put-together, but also where they are broken-down and all that but fuck it.
SHOES.
"More like that in the back room," the girl says because Sera has already picked up a couple of options and is wandering like a snake through the displays. "Dressing room back there too if you see anything you wanna try on."
--
When Sera slips into the backroom, one shoe in either hand, hunting for another slightly more perfect the clerk glances again at Samir. Smiles at him, a painted red mouth.
"Lemme guess," she says, "Tindr, right? That place makes for the weirdest first dates."
SamirSo the clerk is sympathetic. Samir affords her a smile and he's mostly nerves but there's a hint of an actual person in there somewhere. He has a kind smile. Warm eyes. Woodland creatures that aren't used to the smell of man have warm eyes too but they'll bolt at the first sign of trouble and they'll go for your weakest part if you stand between them and escape.
Samir is not like a woodland animal. The comparison doesn't even present itself. Truth be told he's more like the needle his resonance portends. The nectar inside of it. He was worried Serafíne would step on a needle back there in the park. Make of that what you will.
A moment between him and the clerk both of them a given value of sober and then he's doing a double-take like how the hell did she already find shoes in this maze of a space.
"What?" he asks the clerk speaking before thinking and then it dawns on him. "Oh! Hah! No, we..." Another glance after Serafíne and he wrings the back of his own neck how the hell did he get into this situation in the first place and when he sees she hasn't fallen down or broken anything he looks back at the clerk. "Heh." Let go of your neck Samir. Put it back in your pocket. There you go. "We... met at a show."
Should he tell her they're not on a date? Are they on a date? Wait a minute. Shit. He doesn't want to explain. He doesn't have to explain.
"I'm not... I haven't used Tinder. Actually." Turn it around, that's the ticket. "Is it like Facebook?"
Serafíne"Oh," the clerk hums, but there's a quick grin wrapped around the exclamation. The exhalation. She's kind, beneath the spikes and studs and body mods and tattoos. Likes to talk, and it's late now. Lifts a chin because she's up on a bit of a platform and therefore standing taller than Samir. Has a little round mirror to see What Sera Is Up To In The Backroom and checks it. They don't look like shoplifters, but you never know.
"Tinder is like Grindr except for straight people." She explains, then qualifies. "Well, straight ish people. It's like attached to Facebook, though. Or you can use your Facebook on it. Kind of an extension of it. The one I really liked was Cuddlr. Too bad it shot down."
Glance - fore and aft. Rustling in the back. And humming, god knows.
"I went to a party at her house, once, you know?" The clerk, looking back at Samir as Sera comes back into the room wearing thigh-high lace-up gladiator sandals, silver to make her fucking hot pants.
"I think you're in for an interesting night."
She's unzipping a the little side pocket of the hotpants to pull out her credit card to pay for the shoes as she walks.
SamirSamir blows out a breath at the sight of Sera come out of the back room in her new footwear. The sound coincides with the clerk's augury. Or maybe it's a warning. The way he's dressed he can handle an interesting night. Might just be one of those soft-spoken guys who takes a while to warm up to new people.
Sera needs to step up to the register to pay for her new gear so Sam gets on out of her way. Reaches up to rake a few errant strands of dark brown back off his brow and holds it there as he considers this.
"Yeah, well," and a dry laugh at another thing he won't be sharing with the clerk, "it's been interesting so far."
Payment isn't going to take forever but he has an impulse and he decides to indulge it rather than wait at Sera's elbow. Give her space to finish her transaction. Wipe himself out of the clerk's mind fast as. He isn't ducking anyone the way that girl in the park is ducking the entire world but he wants a cigarette. Filthy fucking habit but there's something cleansing about the fire all the same.
"Hey," this to Sera with a quick smoking pantomime, "I'll be outside." The clerk gets a tight but earnest smile and a small wave born of the same hand that made an invisible cigarette. "Thanks. Have a good night."
He hasn't gone anywhere. He's leaning against a bit of brick smoking a cigarette when Sera comes back out. Not blending in with it but he may as well be.
SerafíneThere are always transactions. Here is one: credit card and machine. Here is another, the supple glint of understanding, the human back-and-forth between Samir and the clerk, the clerk and Samir as he ducks out and takes the credit card.
Samir, alone outside, has enough time to light that cigarette. To look up at the sky, framed by the lights of the street, if he is the sort of person to look up at the sky. To take a drag, savor it, and then another, and then the doors are opening and the girl who lost her shoes is emerging in another pair. Finds Samir where he's leaning against the brick, reaches out to take the cigarette from his hand.
I mean, unless he brawls for it?
Takes it and takes a drag and inhales and tips her head back and hands it back, allows the nicotine to swim through her veins like all the rest of it - lovely.
Starts walking, "God it's been forever since I've had a fag."
She doesn't have the British accent to pull that off, but somehow the slang term for a cigarette does not seem like an affectation on her tongue. "What's this place we're going again?" She asks, looking forward, the shoots a glance over her right shoulder, back at where they've been. Quite as casually as she inquired about where next? she also tells him, "I sort of scrubbed our path, past and present. If anyone comes back and looks for where we were and where we went, backwards or now, they'll have to fucking dig through some shit before they even catch a glimpse."
It was hard for her, unnatural, an act of Will. She's kinda proud.
SamirShe should be fucking proud. There aren't a lot of people in the state who could pull off that kind of a feat let alone in the city and Samir didn't even realize that sort of thing was possible. Theory sure he knows the theory is out there but he hasn't started trying to integrate the code for temporal science into his programs and he couldn't even tell she was doing anything excepting for the air felt different around her and his mind is wandering.
When Serafíne reached for the cigarette Samir did not brawl her for it. It left his fingers easy as if he'd given it to her and there's a casual kind of intimacy in sharing another person's cigarette putting your lips where theirs have been and it's been a long time since Samir has shared a cigarette with another person the germs and the insinuation of the other person causing him too much distress and there goes his mind wandering again.
This is all out of order. Side effect of walking with a time-witch.
Anyone looking for them is really going to have to dig.
"How..." He flicks the ash off the cigarette which is threatening to die on them because he didn't smoke it again after Sera handed it to him. A general that-a-way direction to indicate where they're going and that's the closest he's come to leading her and now here they are. "Is that too personal? Asking how you did that?"
Serafíne"Mmm mmm." That's a no, see. Humm / stop. Humm / stop. She's smiling, drifting away, drifting a bit ahead though she has decided to walk to Whereever with him so there's really no threat that she will go too far. It is more: she is pretty fucked up and treats him as an anchor, some invisible line between them and she is the buoy, out and in, out and in, sort of like a dance.
Maybe she likes to dance.
Not as good at it as someone she knows but sometimes he would dance with her and she remembers the step-gliding rhythm of it. Physically, the way she remembers everything.
"It's not too personal. How I did that? You mean like, how did I focus or what did I do? I'm kinda fucked up now so that wasn't hard, but like. You know how everything is the same and also exploded out all at once? Like that fucking paradox that let's us be singular and alone and bounded and also broken apart, sundered, like dissolved back into the everything?"
There's a point where she reaches again for the cigarette, casual, familiar, intimate - easy on all of these points. Doesn't know he's got the germ-thing and doesn't realize he hasn't taken another drag. Her drag sparks the guttering embers back to a brief life they will lose soon as they are returned to his hand.
SamirYou know how everything is the same and also exploded out all at once?
Up go his eyebrows. That isn't anything he knows. He's willing to accept it as her belief sure or maybe some distant concept that they're treating as its own entity for the purposes of rhetoric but that doesn't look like anything he himself has absorbed as part of his own paradigm. He with the clunky little device that could be a weapon same as it could be a tool.
It may as well be her cigarette now. With the reaching comes the handing. He rolled the thing himself. Used a packer and a tamper sure but it didn't come from a bodega. No markings on the paper and the tobacco stays lit longer. That's why he rolls his own. He doesn't like all the shit the tobacco people put into their cigarettes so people don't burn down their house falling asleep on the couch with a lit smoke in hand.
That isn't a fear he entertains. Plenty of others but not that one. He lets Sera hold onto the cigarette as long as she wants.
"Sure," he says after a second to consider what she's said. "I mean, I'm familiar with the concept, I just... I'm just wondering what you did."
Serafíne"Oh," she says. Padding beside him, the soles of her brand-new-shoes a quiet slap against the pavement. Other strangers on the streets: dates and dinners and groups starting to both gather with and retreat from their friends and their lives. Friday-fucking-night.
"Well." She's thinking, like she likes to do sometimes, which is not really the way other people think, and is far, far closer to feeling. All these little holes in her skin breathing in the night, letting go of that quickening fear, the memory of that especial menace like a coil dark around her spine, her basal ganglia.
Yeah, she's known darkness.
She has also: known light.
Gets a choice, too, the way we all do.
"If you wanna be all Hermetic about it - " laughter, the flash of her teeth, the supple shrug of narrow little shoulders. "I warded our path against both scrying and divination. They can't watch-and-follow, they can't reach back and find us Then and follow us to Now. Not without some serious Work, anyway."
Another little shrug. "You're okay, right?"
SamirIf you wanna be all Hermetic about it.
Let's get something out of the way real quick: he is not a humorless young man. His mouth doesn't look as if it has no notion of how to smile and you can't hear dust blowing off his vocal cords when he laughs. And he does laugh. But anxiety hums underneath his skin the way electricity hums through power lines and he's nervous about laughing or letting himself enjoy himself when he's not holed up in his room.
That did strike him as funny. He does laugh. He almost smiles even and cuts her a sidelong glance to read her face as she laughs herself. But he's nervous still or uncomfortable or something. She picks up on it even though she's fucked up.
Samir nods as she explains bolt-by-bolt what she did and part of it makes sense to him. The other part of it doesn't. She catches him off guard with another question.
"Am I...?" He looks confused for a second but it's an affected sort of confused. Smoke-bomb sort of confused. Another dry laugh before, "Other than being totally offended by that shot at Hermetics out of fucking nowhere, yeah. I'm grand."
Serafíne"I just - " pause, compress. Teeth behind lips, around tongue. They're still walking, and she is far more sober than she was: the adrenalin will do that. Cut right through the high. So does the Work somehow. It draws on the mess and lances her open but also re-anchors her: here and now. "See, all that labeling shit. The names and fucking. Seems to take all the magic out of it. I mean, with a small m, you know?
"I'd never be as dour as some of them if the train came and took me off to Hogwarts, no matter what house the sorting hat put me in."
Here again: her smile. Generous yeah but close-mouthed, the grace of her gaze against his profile. The guardedness and the off-guardedness and the anxiety.
"I can help with that, you know?" Doesn't quite know if his anxiety is chronic or intermediate: immediate even, but she offers, and there is something lovely and earnest about the offer, the light against her eyes, the quick-hand surety of it. "Ease that edge for you. If you'd like.
"If you'd let me. I mean, we're both okay. And maybe that wasn't what I was thinking. Maybe that wasn't anything. And we're gonna have fucking cheese fries now and gins and tonics, good ones, with Hendricks and fresh lime."
SamirIn a world where most people don't notice or don't think to notice what's going on around them unless it directly impacts them a body with a wrecked mind becomes accustomed to a certain level of protection from vulnerability. This isn't an enlightened society where mental illness is treated the same as a physical illness. This society can hardly be considered enlightened at all truth be told. You zoom out far enough and you see how humans treat other humans and it all looks like shit from a certain perspective.
He isn't dumb enough to think a woman who can spot a cloaked disparate from a hundred yards away can't pick up on the fact that he's putting on a charade. He doesn't think he's fooling anyone. But then there's the spotlight effect to take into account. The self-perpetuating spiral of anxiety and self-reassurance. It's tiring.
For now he pretends as if he doesn't know. She says she can help with that and Samir frowns. Deepens the frown when she refers to it as an edge. Obvious from looking at him that he either doesn't know what she's talking about or doesn't want to discuss it. Which means it's a good thing she keeps that train running. Mentions cheese fries and gin and tonics and unless she brings it up again he can just pretend she wasn't actually hoping to talk about how much of a weirdo he is tonight.
"Shit," Samir says as they come upon the very place towards which they've been trekking all this time. "Hendricks? I would've worn my good pants if I'd known."
He holds the door open for her. This place doesn't have the air cracked but it is noticeably cooler inside than out on the street. Especially if one happens to be wearing gladiator sandals and hotpants.
Serafíne"Wouldn't have any other kind of gin and tonic." She is telling him as he is opening the door for her and she is slipping past him, tipping her head back, long, bottle-blonde hair shimmy down her spine as her legs fold and unfold. And: cold. Yeah, she shivers a bit when the air hits her, right at the break point between outside and inside. Still with her head tipped back, her eyes dark and banked.
He pretends. That he doesn't know or doesn't want to discuss it or whatever. Okay: see? She doesn't say anything, but you know - looks at him, mutely and kinda doe-eyed in that way that drunk girls start to seem doe-eyed in the dark. A trick of the pupils and the lazy slurry of a glance.
"I have the best fucking taste."
Says the girl in gladiator sandals, hot pants, and a Sid and Nancy tee.
Leads him to a booth way in the back close to the back door rather than the front and crawls way in. The upholstery is made of red velvet and she likes that. Kinda rubs her ear on it.
Waits until he has slipped in opposite (oh he can sit beside her, we just assume that he is not going to make that choice). "I kinda hijacked your whole fucking night, didn't I?"
There is something close to an apology wrapped around those words. I mean, maybe he was about to go get laid.
SamirThe fact that he doesn't sit next to her molds itself up next to the idea that he doesn't want to sit next to her. Semantics maybe. He doesn't seem like the sort of guy who thinks before he opens his mouth. Just kind of starts talking and hopes for the best.
In a few weeks or months. A year maybe. Can't bank on a person you've only just met still being around in a year. She could glimpse into her highball glass and read the future in the carbonation bubbles spun off of the cubes in the drinks they're about to orders but it would only be one probable future. The future doesn't run along one track. What he seems like and what he is are two different things. She doesn't know him yet.
Same as he can't say for certain if she's like this when she's sober. If she's ever sober. If it makes her less of a person for being a substance on two legs. It's easy to judge someone who doesn't remember what they did when they awaken in the morning. He doesn't look as if he judges people though. He sells drugs to pay his electric bills. He doesn't have any room to judge other people.
He doesn't need room for his legs or his elbows either. He's not as tall as his build makes him look. Maybe he does want to sit next to her. Treat this like it's a date. Anxiety, see. It's hijacked his whole fucking life.
So he sits across from her and he keeps the heels of his heavy boots clunked against the underside of his seat. Folds his long bare fingers together and rests them atop the table. He doesn't take off his jacket. It's cold in here. It's nice to sit across from someone and be able to see their face. Unfamiliar but nice.
"Eh," he says. "I was just going to grab something to eat--" He cracks a self-conscious grin and looks down at his hands for a split-second. "--so... cheese fries instead of pho, I can think of worse ways to spend my night. Besides, in the pho scenario, I'm by myself instead of--"
Whatever he was about to say catches in his throat audible like a beartrap just snapped on its ankle and he laughs self-conscious. Stops leaning on his elbows and leans back to swipe at his flyaway hair again. She isn't reading his mind. He'd be able to tell if she was. Would've felt her battering at his shield.
"Instead of... uh..." He gestures to her. Completely changes the subject like he's the one who ought to be apologizing. "I don't... I don't get out much."
SerafíneSomeone comes over to see what they want to eat and drink. Sera orders the gin and tonics and cheese fries and a side of chili and some kinda bread with cheese or fried shit or something like that to go along with it because she cannot be bothered to read more of the menu. Smiles though, scintillating, kalaidescopic. When the server comes for their order she's sitting curled up on her gladiator sandals, legs tucked beneath her in a way that adds height. Then (restless) she harumphs down and uncurls her legs and leans back, way back, lingering again. Lovely.
Fucked up.
"That's all right," our Sera assures him. That little self-conscious laugh maybe, or the subect-changing, or the pho, or whatever. "I get out all the fucking time so like we balance. Probably keeping Venus from crashing in to El Dorado or what the fuck ever, you know?
"Should've ordered two drinks."
This glance up at him, up and across the table. All gleaming edge. "I've been fasting and then tonight I broke it so I'm gonna fucking do everything before I go back. If I get too fucked up and you get tired of me though you can get out my phone and call Dan. Or I'll get an Uber.
"Man I keep forgetting that I can get an Uber."
Her hands on the table, covered in tattoos. Rings: silver mostly, except for the bronze piece on her right index finger. She opens her hands and closes them again. Touches that ring and lets it go.
"You know that night we met, outside of the Ogden? I was sober-as-fuck."
Samir"Yeah, you..."
He remembers the night in question. It was only two weeks ago so he would have to be worse off than she is every night of the week to not remember something that happened two weeks ago but he was not. He was sober as she was. Never conduct business drunk. That's an important rule to live by. Same as not hacking drunk. You hack drunk and interesting shit and/or people who do not take shit tend to show up the next day.
That night her outfit had been just as hipster chic as it is tonight. He had been just as uncomfortable. Smoking a cigarette. New sure but not New. She'd made him uncomfortable. Probably on purpose.
His recollection catches up to his mouth and a stitch appears between his brows. Another uncomfortable breath-of-a laugh and he reaches out to grab a silverware roll. Manipulates it with his fingers without opening it up. Gives him something to focus on but that way lies ritual and ritual tends to send him off the rails.
Focus, Sam. Look her in the eye. There you go.
"You were sober?"
Serafíne"Yep."
Hums around the word. Meets his eyes across the table. Her own gleaming, make-up applied and smeared to something that seems almost deliberately disheveled. Mouth twisted, wry, raw. She made him uncomfortable then. Maybe she's making him uncomfortable now, meeting his eyes right back, running, quick unconsciously, one tattooed fingertip along the band of a bronze wing that makes her feel like her scapulae are opening up and she is soaked in the sun.
Their drinks come and she doesn't look up but still manages to slide her hand around the glass.
"i like it when you laugh."
SamirAnd he'd let Sera order the drinks because she came in here knowing exactly what she wanted and he was just along for the ride anyway. Cheese fries instead of pho. He'd made up his mind when he decided to let her latch onto him back there in the park. If something had come out of the trees he might have let her protect him. Might have. Hard to tell without looking into those other probable futures what he would have done.
When the server returns Sam gives her a professional sort of a smile not entirely unlike the one he'd given the clerk at the shoe store. Terse thanks to go with it. Their drinks smell like rose petals and juniper and come garnished with cucumber instead of lime because that's the kind of place this is and Sera wasn't as explicit about what sort of garnish she wanted with the gin and tonic as she was with the chili.
His eyes come back to hers and he puts the silverware roll down heavier than he meant to. Like the period at the end of a sentence. He takes the cucumber slice off his glass and eats it before he does anything else.
She likes it when he laughs. This of course makes him laugh. Muffled for the cucumber in his mouth. He does have some manners.
"Yeah?" he asks. "Why?"
As much as he likes the way alcohol dulls his nerves he doesn't like to get stupid off it. His first sip is slow.
Serafíne"I think it's the layers," she tells him, quite as naturally as she would tell anyone anything. The brief spasm of her smile, present again, pregnant again, as the tonic water fizzes and bursts and sparks in the glass. Her elbows on the table now. He has a view of the tattoo dominating the meat of her left forearm: a stylized crow's skull, black work like everything else.
Cants her golden head and reaches down and picks up that drink and drinks it, an immoderate sip. See, she likes to get stupid off of it. Off of everything. She loves to let herself go.
"That hint of dissonance, and the letting-go. I like that too. Did you know every time you yawn your heart stops beating?"
SamirNot a laugh this time but a smile. Not a happy smile it doesn't reach his eyes but it is nice to hear praise from a stranger. A second later he is laughing but not because of what she'd said about his laugh. Because of a medical marvel she presents as truth.
"Bullshit."
He says it easy like they're talking about sports or some other inconsequential topic. Nothing over which they're about to start another conflict on the scale of the Himalayan War.
"Like, it stops when the yawn starts and then it starts again, or it's stopped the whole time you're yawning?"
--
As far as accidental first dates go this one is painless. Maybe Sam would even call it fun. They settle in on their own sides of the booth one of them curled up in her seat and growing ever drunker and the other sat up straight in his. Their food arrives. It's fucking delicious.
No one will ever admit this but there's an art to making junk food same as there is to making haute cuisine. At some point Samir says the cheese fries remind him of poutine. Sera has to have had poutine. He hasn't had poutine since the last time he went to visit his grandparents in Vancouver.
There's a bit of personal information she can take away from tonight. His maternal grandparents are still alive. They live in Vancouver. That's where he was born. He and his mother left Vancouver when he was twelve because she got a position teaching at the University of Barcelona. They don't have poutine in Barcelona. They have patatas bravas which are salt potatoes that are boiled and then fried and doused in mouth-meltingly hot aioli. You can get it with a shot of orujo if you're really feeling ambitious. He claims orujo put his first hair on his chest.
Sam can fucking talk if you let him get going. He's not a natural storyteller by any means and it's obvious the more he talks that he's more self-aware than the average twenty-something male tends to be. He goes off of what seems to be interesting to Sera and not what interests him.
He is interested in her. Altered as she was when their paths first crossed tonight and drunk as she's liable to get as it progresses she can tell Sam is interested in her. For a given value of 'interested.'
--
They leave before the staff has to kick them out. Sam offers to pay the bill but isn't going to fight Sera if she wants to do it herself. They're outside again. Maybe he's offered to call her a cab or a Dan or a someone. Maybe he did that while they were settling up the tab.
He holds the door for her as they go back outside.
SerafíneIt is bullshit, but that hardly seems to matter, and he calls it bullshit and she smiles and doesn't admit it. She smiles: around her teeth, around the words, closed-mouthed but there's something craning in the way she lifts her neck into the challenge.
What she tells him about yawns is that a yawn is a seizure, a moment of opening, some different plane. Everything stops. It's a tick of the world, it's a wormhole or some of that Star Trek shit. And Sera is earnest about it as fuck but she's also starting to giggle, smiling, wants another drink and orders it, wiggles her ass in her seat, and admits, eventually, to the bullshit.
She's listing now, and he's talking. About his family, his mother, Barcelona and salt potatoes. She hustles out a little bit of Spanish, native-ish, fluent. Considers Vancouver, tells him she's never been there, and hasn't ever poutine no. His family is natural background, all those ordinary things. He doesn't hear anything about her own, but he does hear about her friends and roommates and Dee's derby dolls and her own mother fucking parties.
Tells him about the desultory band she's in that is so fucking badass but still doesn't have a name. Tells him that she's decided that she's going to really give it a go, though. They're gonna put together an EP and do the work and see if they can make it. Not bigtime, precisely, because it's not like their shit is mainstream. But: yeah. Try become actual working musicians, no need for dayjobs.
--
Outside, into a new darkness. She walks past him as he opens the door. He did call her a Dan or a cab or an Uber or a someone. Who knows how long that'll be.
Sera steps past him, just, and waits until Samir lets the door close behind them. Tips her head up like she likes to say hi to the moon, some fucking times. Closes her eyes, inhales, then drops her chin and opens her eyes and looks back at him over her right shoulder.
"That was fun, Sam." This pause, framed by her half-smile. "Is it okay if I kiss you goodnight?"
SerafíneIt is bullshit, but that hardly seems to matter, and he calls it bullshit and she smiles and doesn't admit it. She smiles: around her teeth, around the words, closed-mouthed but there's something craning in the way she lifts her neck into the challenge.
What she tells him about yawns is that a yawn is a seizure, a moment of opening, some different plane. Everything stops. It's a tick of the world, it's a wormhole or some of that Star Trek shit. And Sera is earnest about it as fuck but she's also starting to giggle, smiling, wants another drink and orders it, wiggles her ass in her seat, and admits, eventually, to the bullshit.
She's listing now, and he's talking. About his family, his mother, Barcelona and salt potatoes. She hustles out a little bit of Spanish, native-ish, fluent. Considers Vancouver, tells him she's never been there, and hasn't ever poutine no. His family is natural background, all those ordinary things. He doesn't hear anything about her own, but he does hear about her friends and roommates and Dee's derby dolls and her own mother fucking parties.
Tells him about the desultory band she's in that is so fucking badass but still doesn't have a name. Tells him that she's decided that she's going to really give it a go, though. They're gonna put together an EP and do the work and see if they can make it. Not bigtime, precisely, because it's not like their shit is mainstream. But: yeah. Try become actual working musicians, no need for dayjobs.
That's the plan, when she gets back.
Back from what?
Seeking, you know. Something.
Soon. That's why she's fasting. That's why she was so fucking sober.
Not fasting now but you know: mostly. It's like ritual or some shit, that's what someone taught her once.
--
Outside, into a new darkness. She walks past him as he opens the door. He did call her a Dan or a cab or an Uber or a someone. Who knows how long that'll be.
Sera steps past him, just, and waits until Samir lets the door close behind them. Tips her head up like she likes to say hi to the moon, some fucking times. Closes her eyes, inhales, then drops her chin and opens her eyes and looks back at him over her right shoulder.
"That was fun, Sam." This pause, framed by her half-smile. "Is it okay if I kiss you goodnight?"
SamirThey could've stayed inside all night just shooting the shit. Even if she lacks enthusiasm he wants to hear about the band. Maybe one day he'll hear the band. Better to hear the band in person than through a set of headphones but Sam has to really mentally prepare himself to go to a live show.
She asked him about it before they even got to the pub on Vine but Samir hadn't wanted to talk about it. Still doesn't want to talk about the three letters that make leaving his fucking apartment such an ordeal. He's not going to leave the fucking apartment again for another week maybe two and she'll start to forget what he looks like even if she doesn't forget that she had fun with him.
Outside the air is thin and hot and the breeze come down out of the mountains is nothing like the air churned out of a conditioning unit. It's cleaner. Man had nothing to do with it.
Next time they see each other she may be sober. Fasting. In the midst of ritual or some shit. For all she knows she'll never see him again never mind this not leaving the apartment for a week or two shit. They don't have any kind of assurance of permanency. He doesn't like to take risks.
Sera inhales the moonlight and Sam touches the cigarettes in his pockets but the moon stays where it is and so do his smokes. She turns towards him. Asks him what she asks him.
His lips part like he's about to laugh again or ask a question but then he catches himself. Takes a deep breath like he's about to dive off a pier and comes to stand in front of her. Puts his hand on the back of Sera's neck and looks her in the eye before looking at her lips. Sam's heart is beating fast but it doesn't stop on him.
So he kisses her goodnight.
SerafíneShe likes to kiss, Sera. Strangers and friends and strange friend and friendly strangers. On the sidewalk, outside a bar, on the stoop, beneath the humming buzz of a porchlight, moths playing kamikaze pilot with their false little moon.
Her eyes all full of darkness as he starts to laugh again or ask a question, steady in a way that her body isn't because fucked up is kinda her baseline.
She lifts her chin a little bit when he slides his hands beneath the weight of her hair, the back of her neck and then: he kisses her goodnight.
Sera kisses him back, her own arms unfolding, thoughtlessly akimbo, forearms sliding into place on his shoulders as if that were the most natural place to be. She is smiling against his mouth and it starts off chaste and sweet like that but then she's opening her mouth against his, tasting like gin and cheesefries, drinking in the kiss and the bravery and the bravura and the hammering-of-his-heart. And that kiss breaks off and maybe he thinks they're done but no, she kisses him again, laughter between breaths, this gentle insistent opening repetition until it dawns on him that this is not just a goodnight kiss, but he is actually making out with a lithe stranger in silver hotpants and thigh-high gladiator sandals who tastes kinda like rosepetals and kinda like juniper and kinda like chili and who is really, really, really fucking good at making out. Tender, see, the meat of her thumb against his cheek. Eager, too, the press of her hips -
Hard to say how long it goes on. But then there are headlights, some tattooed stranger, (exclaiming "DAN!" as she lets go of Samir and wraps her arms around the new guy's neck.) He's tall and skinny and he returns the hug with a sort of enfolding and kisses her on the crown of her head and looks up and over at Samir and asks Sera private question and she shakes her head by way of answer.
Dan offers Samir a ride home. Maybe he declines. Heads home on his own. Either way there's one last kiss from her, quick and sure, the chaste grace of it against his cheekbone, and then she's gone, giving herself back to Dan, who teases her quietly, surely about breaking her fast.
'night Samir.
