Open Mic

Serafíne

Another hole in the wall, designed that way, artful touches meant to evoke a history that the building might have, which the establishment lacks. None of it really matters, there's enough there to get you in the door, squeezing past the little fenced in outdoor patio where the smokers are relegated into the narrow dogleg of a bar proper. The booths lining the wall are not simply full, but spilling over, and the bar is just as crowded. Inside, with the ambient noise, the conviviality, the music, the din you would never guess that it is Wednesday night. No Man's Land.

A fucking Wednesday night, the largest group of friend cohering/adhering has taken over the largest of the booths - this old circular one that dominates the back corner, cozied up against the small stage, which is empty now but: a small sign in the window says Wednesday - Open Mic - and that's why everyone's here.

This is a break, though. So there's music and chatter and drinks all around, all of this shimmying back and forth, buying rounds, sliding from table to table, chatting up friends, rivals, exes, strangers you cannot help but be drawn to. Among the folks lounging at the round booth in the far back, closest to the stage is someone who is hard to overlook. The air around her has this quickened intensity. Everything about her is sharp, vibrant, compelling right?

Even from a distance. Especially from a distance.

Maybe it's the rock-star vibe: low-slung cut-offs denim shorts over thigh-high fishnets, paired with a black leather halter covered in silver metal studs and spikes, beneath a black hoodie, unzipped, the metal teeth framing the concave curve of her whiplean torso. And fuck it, she's not sitting on the bench seat, but rather above the seat, on the spine - slight, you know? Sharper and finer than you remember, though why and how is not precisely clear unless one pays attention to the way her body changes when she starves herself, as she is doing now. Dark ink flashing with each gesture of her animated little hands, on the left palm, framing the right, inside both wrists, covering much of her inner left forearm, and so on, and so on. She talks with those hands, quick and sure and confident, with this essentially masculine swagger that belies delicacy of her frame.

And she's laughing now. Smiling at someone. Taking a picture: maybe a selfie.

That's the way it goes.

Elijah

He liked these kinds of places. Elijah could have been doing any number of things, like talking to people or getting some studying done or trying to convince the university to let him take more than the required amount of classes because something lit a fire under his ass and all of a sudden Elijah Poirot wanted something, and if he wanted something, he would do anything and everything in his power to get said thing. He's a young, white, cisgendered male of an upper middle class family. He's been told the world is his, should he want to take it. He's probably never known hunger nor want nor any number of things (people wouldbe wrong to think he's known no suffering, that life has been easy, but his parents are paying a significant amount of money for him to fuck around at a private college. It says something.)

He didn't know what kind of open mic it was, but he wanted to find out. He was giving himself a break, because he would always give himself a break. Always catch himself at the right time, or the wrong time, give himself too much leeway because he's never really had to be pushed. Even magic came easily right until the point it didn't come easily, until he butted against something and couldn't figure out the way through until he realized that wall was all him. He was what held himself back so fuck what kind of open mic it was.

Elijah was going. That was that.

He's got jeans on, the kind with some holes that he's actually worn into them in some painfully stylish fashion from a few years back that actually came, largely, from climbing out a window and tearing himself up in a rose bush. All torn shirt and jeans and scratched cheeks and spit out rose petals and it hurt but so what? Sera's laughing, and that's what draws him in, away from a bar, away from his white tee shirt and the brunette with the eyeliner who had been talking to him. He winked, bid her goodbye, he had to meet a friend.

"You ever hear about those fuckin' stick things people use to take selfies?" was his hello. He's got about a dozen bracelets on one wrist, a necklace that he can't take off because Jenn tied it on and it hasn't worn out yet.

Serafíne

"Huh?" says she, and also - "huh?" mid-laugh. The flash of her teeth, the darting delicacy of her chin. This sharp look framing the beneficence of her smile as she looks up from selfie-taking and story-telling with the young woman with electric-blue hair who is both somehow beside her and at her feet (seated in the booth properly) and zeroes in on Elijah.

Oh, Elijah.

Sera favors him with a spreading smile that is wrapped in a half-dozen layers and reaches out - leaning forward, see, over both seat-and-people and perhaps table too - to offer him her hand, palm up. This is an invitation. Maybe to take her hand, maybe to kiss her knuckles, maybe to climb over everyone and come sit beside her and share her throne.

Or perhaps to sit at her feet, in that booth, the way the lesser gods are always doing with Zeus in the old Greek myths.

"Those things are fucking obnoxious!" Announces Our Sera, when and if Elijah has clambered over all those strangers, and perhaps even if he has not.

Elijah

She reaches out, and forward, and he takes himself in and forward. It's over people, it's around people, there's a moment where he lingers and talks to someone, cracks some joke about unintentional flirtations over awkward body positioning ("And I really rather it be intentional-" a smile, a promise "-definitely intentional.") and comes across. Over. around, and slides in.

He does take her hand, like an anchor, once he gets close enough raises in, lips briefly to her fingers and down again (like the Godfather, you see, kissing rings and favors on the day of my daughter's wedding, though Sera never seemed the type to behead horses to make a point) and it's in the booth.

His usual response is to sit on tables. Elijah st on tables and bars and put his feet in a chair and settled in. No, this time his rear end was half in the seat and half on the person on his other side and he settled in anyway because he was a thin little thing. Puts his arms where they'll fit, regardless of who might be there.

Those things are fucking obnoxious.
"Right? I thought it was just something the internet made up, but seriously, it's a thing. People buy them."

He then makes a sound that is eh! ish in nature, but it's lost to the blair of people.

Serafíne

So Elijah climbs up and over and around and in, young and athletic enough to manage it, squeezes himself right in between the girl with electric blue hair and Sera's own fishnet clad legs. Sera's feet are bare, heels kicked off and tumbled beneath the table where the neck of a guitar case sticks up the ground. They're all here (mostly) for the electric-blue-haired girl, who is not someone Elijah has met before, or seen among Sera's friends, but that hardly signifies. What the hell does he know about Sera's friends?

And if he tries that flirtatiousness over awkward-body-positioning with the blue-haired girl she rolls her eyes and smirks - friendly enough, but still a deeply skeptical smirk, and when he brushes his mouth over Sera's knuckles in some strange echo of a courtly gesture (match for his watch-in-a-pocket and his ever-present vest) Sera also rolls her eyes, just a bit, and smirks.

That expression is as quick and sure and just as darting as any other that skims the edges of her mobile little mouth. Precise at the end in a way that feels quite nearly chaste or perhaps simply: chained, restrained, banked, you know?

Her fine fingers are bristling with rings-like-brass-knuckles or brass-knuckles-like-spiked-rings anyway, the tips cool and lightly damp.

"People buy anything." Returns Sera, philosophical, though in some substantial way she does not believe that that is true. "Everything. I wish they'd buy more shit, though, you know? More poetry and madness, less of this fucking ordinary shit. What the fuck are you doing out tonight, anyway?"

Wiggles her inked fingers there, for emphasis.

"Aren't you supposed to be studying or some shit? Reading half a fucking library."

Hard to tell if she means: college or that bullshit Hermetic stuff. Could be both, could be neither. You'd have to ask to find out; that doesn't mean she'd tell.

Elijah

He does not try to be flirtatious with the blue-haired girl, though he does make eye contact and grin. The tiniest bit of cad in with the remnants of antiquated manners (like the pocketwatch didn't say it all- it's survived a car wreck. The face has a hairline crack and there's the tiniest bit of blood worked into the inlay on the front. It makes him like it more.)

"I don't think you can buy madness, you just get it. Madness shows up with a fuckin' lampshade on its head or screams on your lawn at four in the morning because it loves you or the stars are falling out of the sky or blacking out-" no, not like he's cried out on her couch, convinced the world was falling apart at all "-or whatever needs to be screamed or whispered or held like some butterfly or some shit. You come up on madness and you go I need this and so, it stays with you, maybe, until it's done."

Says done like he's done, like he's effused all the poetry he has on madness in a huff and has inherited a verbose nature from Kalen, or perhaps attracted the man because there is that in common. Except in this: Elijah is not Kalen. Their tangents are not the same. (Not anymore).

"I decided that the library would be there tomorrow. Presumably. But tonight would not be here tomorrow and I wanted to see what this open mic thing was- like, singing or poetry or vaudeville? Fuck if I know," he said with a shrug, "I needed a break before Hell week."

He could have been talking about college or that bullshit Hermetic stuff. Could be both, could be neither.

"I've been trying to learn how to behave in public and learning fuck that. Do you have any idea what order the sorbet course comes in? Because I had no fucking clue that was a thing."

Serafíne

There are a solid dozen bottles littered over the round table at the center of the booth, and four martini glasses and five highballs and two wineglasses and one lone and lonely-looking frozen-martini-in-a-glass-that-looks-like a cactus and none of those drinks are hers. Not that Elijah knows that.

But she's smiling kinda-down at him, shadows dark over her face, the light behind her. These glimpses, these gleams when she cants her head aside or lifts her chin enough to catch the light. Or smiles: as she does now, reaching down to twist her fingers through his hair and something about the gesture, or maybe the gleam of his blond locks twisting through her fingers, or maybe the liquid feel of it, or the tangible hint of oil and sweat that grounds us all, makes us human, has her stilling, closing her mouth, catching her breath, present and absent all at once. This sometimes haunted edge that -

- but no. A taller form behind her pushing up the hood of the hoodie to cover the crown of her head and oh fuck, guess what? it is topped by a black-and-silver unicorn horn and this ragged mane stitched into the downcurving seam below the crown squares of black leather and silver sequins and everything in between, a mad little patchwork. Sera shakes the hood off the crown of her head though does this without objection and cranes her head back a bit and lo!

There is Dan, arms around her neck and shoulders, and she's tipping her head back, a brief, affectionate glance, a banked and almost private pleasure evident in the frame of that look.

"It's an open mic. So it's pretty much whatever the fuck you wanna do, but it's so fucking popular that you have to get on the schedule, and fuck I think they're scheduled out what - " Sera glances at Dan, who supplies -

"I think it's a couple of months at least, maybe more."

"I mean," Sera, continuing, "you could go up there with one of those fucking talking puppets - "

"Ventroliquist?"

" - whatever the fuck they are. Mostly it's singer-songwriters and poets and rappers and shit. I mean, but sometimes it's strangers complaining about their plumbing problems or their asshole neighbors or storytellers or toastmasters or exhibitionists or people trying to tackle their fear of public speaking or what the fuck ever. That's what I like best, the people who get up there to fucking ramble about learning how to behave in public." This, with another quick little smirk and an upward lilt of her chin.

"What does that even mean? Whose asshole rules are you trying to learn?"

Elijah

He doesn't have the foggiest idea that none of those glasses are hers, doesn't know that it's been awhile since he last saw her drink, that he's last seen her indulge in such a fashion but she is keen and more and he likes it but when has he ever not liked Sera? When has he ever not taken the opportunity to close his eyes and take the whole of her presence- the parts he can handle, the parts that are not too much and leave him drowning- like a flood. Like a hurricane, only now it doesn't scare him like it used to. Only now he pushes back, willing to drown in whatever is there because it's always been there- he wonders if he could really fathom Sera sometimes. She seems so much more than reality, like mundane bullshit was beyond her notice.

There's that haunted edge, the cant of the light and he's looking at her mouth and his green eyes are flicking up towards hers to take in the color of hers and there was something there he hadn't noticed before. Something he doesn't ask about because there's people all over, because it doesn't seem right, because she smiled at him and he'd rather drink in that smile right now than take in some hard truth. Sips, not tidal waves.

And like some be-horned spectre, there is Dan. Makes Elijah beam to see him, but it was back to conversation.

"Oh, I wanna do this," he says, like it's something dangled in front of him, "fuck two months, I can figure out something to say in two months." Like he didn't have enough already.

But there is a continuation and he shrugs, sighs something with not-so-mock exasperation, something dramatic to hide the actual exasperation. "I could never fuckin' figure that out? I was supposed to learn something from that Trent guy but we never got on to protocol and fuck if I know why the default assumption is that however the fuck I carry myself around people who supposedly matter is unacceptable-" he realizes he doesn't have a drink, he would have drank to that but he waves it off "-and who gets to say who's a big deal and who isn't? Shouldn't you just endeavor to not be a dick when dealing with people? Don't be a dick shall be the whole of the law? It just all seems like unnecessary crap and everyone knows it but they like jumping through the fuckin' hoops anyway because what? It makes them feel good?"

A beat.

"I'm doing that thing where I talk, and I'm not giving anyone the chance to actually interject, sorry." A genuine sorry.

Serafíne

"'Course you can." This is Dan, but his bearded mouth is against Sera's temple, the edge of it, where her pulse beats and beats and beats, pumped there by her fast little heart, and something about the natural way they twine together marks the awareness that lays between them. The magick. The care. And Sera, her mouth gives this responsive little twinge of a smile as Dan assures Elijah that he can come up with something to say in two months and Sera hooks her narrow shoulders upwards, this sublime little gesture, as she finishes her consor's thought - " - and we'll be there with bells on."

--

Then, oh, then.

They're making this fine cocoon, aren't they? The noise around them recedes or perhaps that is merely a trick of one's senses. Focus on the conversation in the foreground, and the rest becomes little more than bright, convivial white noise. No matter how open, how confident, how compelling Sera is, the strangers (to Elijah, though now Sera) all around him also somehow instinctively recognize that they Do Not Belong to the self-same flock.

"See," Sera is saying, and her tattooed fingers are still waterfalling through Elijah's slippery golden hair. "The don't be a dick shall be the whole of the law, you should've followed my path, not theirs. Right? Think about their names, all those goddamned distinctions. And it's not that it's meaningless.

"That shit is infused with meaning because they inhabit the forms and protocols and rituals, because they draw the circles and bow to the north wind and cleanse their palates between courses with a pinch of salt from a silver salver or a fucking sorbet and pick up the proper fork a the proper time.

"What is protocol but another word for ritual, high or fucking low?

"Tell me this. Why do you think people bow before a sovereign queen? Or why do you think countries care about whose flag is fucking higher?"

Elijah

There's a sameness, and a difference. No matter how close they were sitting, the tone of the conversation, the pieces and the weight and the parts of the words and sentences and what-have-you. He puts forth a lovely front but there had always been some sense of otherness. Being there but not really being all there. And the hum and general sound and buzz around them is just white noise, another layer of white noise he's accustomed to tuning out. Except this wasn't so much tuning out as tuning in

She runs her hand through his hair, fingers though golden locks and he closes his eyes for a second, takes in words and sensation at the same time and knows good and well which he feels a stronger connection to.

Why do people bow to a queen? Who cares if the flag is higher-

"It's symbolic communication- the queen isn't different than any other human being. The flag's just a scrap of fabric but people invest meaning in those things because they're symbols- a sovereign queen is the sign of the nation, at once being above the people and for the people, sovereignty makes her a mother figure. Even if, politically speaking, the queen doesn't have any power, she is still that symbol. They bow to show respect to the symbol, not to respect of the person because a really fucking tiny portion of the world is actually buds with a queen. The flag's the same way, it speaks as national identity, for good or for bad. A flag becomes a sign of the people but a sign of the values of those represented by it- it's a statement of their values and their sovereignty being more respected in an area than anything else. It's a sign of, like, a higher order. Why national flies over state, why things go at half mast- to say that for a moment even the nation bows in respect to something of importance."

Serafíne

Sera breathes out, not sharply but deeply. This quiet gusting breath lost beneath the ambient noise. The way she sits above him, looking down, emphasizes the angularity of her features. The prominence of her nose, the cut of her cheekbones, her jaw. The light behind her plays halo-ish tricks in the crown of her golden sidecut.

"That's not really what I meant." Humor there, and a kind of tenderness that feels errant without being accidental. Knight-errant, the tilting-at-wildmills sort. Her long-fingered hand settles, though, on the crown of his head, gentle, thoughtful, quixotic. "My question wasn't quite that literal. It was more metaphorical, right? People pour meaning into that; bowing to the queen means something to everyone in the royal court. So does not -bowing.

"Those rules aren't rules that you can opt-out of, at least, not until you've fucking learned them and you've decided you want to say something different to everyone watching. Not if you're a member of the royal court. Or, you know, House Gryffindor. See, if you want there to be meaning in breaking the rules, you have to know them in the first place. Music's like that too - I'm all for breaking the dominance of the western major scale but who can do that successfully without understanding its unpinnings and its fractures?

"And I'm not saying it's a bad fucking thing to say something different to everyone who is watching, but - I mean, if you are fundamentally so fucking opposed to the idea that there are some rules of protocol you need to learn, I gotta wonder if you belong there in the first place. Most of the people in that group you're gonna meet spend a helluva lot of time, probably on their knees, learning those rituals and protocols in the first place, you know?"

Elijah

"I don't get it," he admits, he sighs. And it isn't defeat it's just... a disconnect. A difficulty, "I tried to figure out the whole social implications, I tried to figure out the historical background, I tried to piece it together from a cultural context and I just... I'm missing something."

Distraught. Distraught was a nice word for it. There are things he doesn't tell Kalen, he puts on a good face and seems like he gets it when he learns it but there's sweeping cuts of form and function that just... don't... click. And he's trying, the sound of his voice, the insistence that he studied, the honesty in it all says that he was really trying and it just... wasn't clicking.

She might have experienced it before, or perhaps not. Elijah was a spoiled thing. She probably had hints of this, the cell phone that seems easily replaced when he breaks it. The fact that he generally fucks off at an absurdly expensive college, or even the fact that he has an apartment that he can support two people in despite having a part time job that probably pays him minimum wage. He's not accustomed to things being difficult. There are things Sera doesn't know. She doesn't know that this extended to school, that this extended to him sleeping through classes and skirting by and pulling a B out of his ass at the end of a semester because oh, I need to do this or my parents will be pissed. Or oh, I'm three points shy of an A, why not try a little?

He's not used to trying because, frankly, when one doesn't actually try one doesn't have to risk failure. One can shrug it off as not really trying, and it's a wash. If you don't try at something you're afraid of failing at, then you didn't really fail. You just gave up, lest you find out that you are wanting.

This was a problem. This was a big problem because he actually was trying and finding that something wasn't working and magic was easier than this stupid-

It wasn't stupid, though. There were reasons behind it. He could pick apart pieces but couldn't stick them into a whole. Couldn't make sense of the bigger picture and it was killing.

"I don't get it. I tried, I did the research I went through the damn process and I'm supposed to get it and it's still not there."

This is something he should tell Kalen.

This is something he isn't going to tell Kalen.

Serafíne

Perception + Empathy: specific to the stuff about Hermetics and Hermeticism.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5) ( success x 1 )

Serafíne

Well wtf? SERA LOOKS HARDER. +1 difficulty.

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 6, 6, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 6 ) [WP]

Elijah

There was a statement, and it could first come by dissection. Like diagramming a sentence, like picking apart literary devices that the author chose and understanding the elements in order to understand the piece. The first outburst was understandable, textbook high school student when it comes out. It's exasperation, it's faulting the system for something he doesn't understand and because he doesn't understand it, clearly, it must be dumb. He hasn't worked inside of that system because, in Denver, the system consisted of (possibly) three people. Two out of the three people he's interacted with from the tradition he was petitioning seemed keen on an idea that rank, that accomplishment, that the structure wasn't... perhaps... completely... there.

It's him writing it off. It's him trying to dismiss a concept because he doesn't understand the concept. And not for lack of trying, either. He's beaten it to death, failed to see the forest for the trees and only came out with dirt under his nails and no idea why it was there. It was a chapter that was covered in the books, insisted upon because, someday, this would come up. Someday, this could be useful and perhaps presented in a neutral light at best.

It's test time. Shows up with a scantron and someone hands him a blue book and there is that moment of blanching, that moment of horror because he'd plugged away at this like it was multiple choice. Taught for the test for what the reviewing committees were looking for and, once it was learned, could promptly be thrown away to make room for the next test. His outburst, his dismissal, his flippancy comes from a desire to hide the fact that he really, genuinely, doesn't understand the concept. That he came up on something he'd actually tried for and found that his best wasn't good enough. It's easy to say the rules are formalities when you've boiled them down into nice, simple parts.

And he confesses, confesses that he's tried, that he's tried to put the pieces together to give meaning to words and symbols but they just aren't linking together and he's stumbling like he has two puzzles mixed together. He learned protocol and structure from a man who was on the outskirts of the Order, admittedly and openly perhaps on probation. His own mentor, the person who showed him that magic was real, covertly intent on reworking the order from within. It's difficult, because Elijah doesn't understand. He's having a hard time reconciling that the structure is important, has a hard time believing that it is integral when the sources the knowledge came from weren't so passionate on the subject.

There are holes in his education, and they're starting to show.

But he's trying to plug them in, he's trying to make things make sense but he's still sitting in an exam room staring at the bluebook trying not to panic because he knows he has the answers, somewhere in the rote memorization and the piles of books he read once upon a time when he loved the subject.

Because it's true, it's true that he did, that he does, that it doesn't quite come through in his sullen pouting (and make no mistake, he'd thrown a tantrum, quiet as it was, younger than he was and needed to grow the fuck up like he's heard half a dozen times from half the mages he knows) He loves this because it is difficult, he may be sitting there while time's running out and all he wants to do is turn in a blank paper and beg to take the class again. He didn't want to know the answer, didn't want someone to tell him because he wanted to find it.

He's turned in every test and he doesn't know his grade going into the final. Doesn't know if he's been doing it right or wrong until he find himself massively wrong and there was the assumption that he would correct himself.

There are holes in his education, and they're starting to show. Elijah can't fill them fast enough, and some were left intentionally there. Blank and gaping like some gunshot wound he was supposed to just deal with.

There are holes in his education, and he wants to fill them but he doesn't know how.

Serafíne

Sera loves a Hermetic, but that does not mean she understands their ordered world. Their names and their angels, their orders and protocols, their wands and their weapons, their altars. Their words. But her hand is tender on the crown of Elijah's head and she is watching him with such a close, quickened attention. This strange, frustrating moment where what she Sees is little more than what he Says has her seaming her mouth and blowing out a breath that stirs the strands of his fine, fine hair.

Then her hand slides down to cup the back of his skull and she is leaning-leaning-leaning forward, precariously perched on the spine of that booth, crowded in on all sides by her friends. One of the bar owners is heading back to the mic, the list of the evening's performers in hand, and the blue-haired girl (up next) is excusing herself, extricating her guitar case from beneath the table and somehow manages not to upend even a single drink.

"Elijah," she tells him, quiet, tender really. "If you wanna learn this shit. If you wanna commit yourself to Hogwarts, you gotta commit. You gotta pretend that you're fucking Hermione, and spend less of your time getting fucked up and doing whatever you want whenever you want and a helluva lot more of it in the library.

"Or, hell. Maybe you should spend more've your time building one of your own. Do you know how much time Hawksley spent in his? Or on the fucking quidditch court if the library isn't for you. I mean, I am fucking sure that there are plenty of ways to figure out how to be a Hufflepuff or a Ravenclaw, or fucking whatever, but I don't think many of them involve closing down the bars of LoDo on a regular basis while getting high as a kite and canoodling with whoever wants to canoodle.

"I mean, I'm all for canoodling and getting stoned yeah? But I'm so far from what you wanna be - "

Sera closes her mouth then; something, some string-in-her heart has her turning head head almost sharply away from Elijah. Maybe she's watching her blue-haired friend lift the guitar out of its case and start getting it back into tune, more likely she is somewhere: far away.

When she glances back at him, her eyes are shining, though this could be a trick of the light, nothing more. "I'm gonna see if I can find someone else for you to talk to, okay? I'll let you know."