Eleven-thirty rounding closer to midnight and the only reason the doors are open and the crowd is streaming out now is someone turned off the singer's mic after the third encore and management turned on the harsh house lights and started playing the star-spangled banner. Three dudes in thick black beards start right in the middle of the bank of doors leading into The Palace belting out one of those misheard versions of the national anthem and it's hard to tell whether their errors are deliberate and ironic or simply the result of overindulgence in some beverage or substance or the delights of being a heavily bearded dude standing outside a stinking-hot concert venue watching the sweaty organism of your fellow-travelers spill outside. A poet might say it's like watching a galaxy being formed: the great singular mass of the audience resolving itself into small pinpoints of light: bright, moving, liquid, exultant.
She's part of that mass, Sera. The sort of girl who takes a stranger's hand in a dark and crowded club and follows him into the center of the pit and drops that hand quite as easily and simply as she took it in the first place, sliding out of his orbit, singular, eccentric, golden.
SamirThis man is not a poet. He's a drug dealer and a shut-in besides. All he has to say about the experience is many people populated it and he felt compelled to count every person who passed over the threshold but he was waiting for one person in particular and that one person wasn't even part of the concert they were just meeting someone after the concert and once he did what he needed to do he was fully intending to just leave but then the crowd came pouring out of the door and this other person wanted to stand talking for a long time and he didn't want to be rude.
So here is Sam.
And here is Sera.
Sam is speaking Spanish to a young woman named Yolanda and they are both dark of skin his mother being from India and her parents both being from the Dominican Republic but in this city nobody pays any more attention to Spanish than they do to English. Businessmen and engineers and doctors speak both languages in this city. Some of them even speak Mandarin or Vietnamese. It's a big city for one so high up.
Yolanda wants to sleep tonight. That's why she's here. Sam is Awake. That has nothing to do with the why but he is here all the same. And when Sera comes near he almost but does not quite look away. Aware, you see. He's aware.
Serafíne(awareness - )
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 4 )
SerafíneSera is awake, and blonde (bottle) and not precisely fair but fair-er than Samir and Yolanda. The Spanish though - the rhythm of it, more liquid, more elegant than English - is as familiar to her as her blood-and-bones. Right now it is no more than one out of a half-hundred conversations hanging in the air around her. She drifts through them, a stranger dressed low-slung cut-offs and a see through black lace bra.
Has something tied loose around her hips and something else slung over her left shoulder, maybe a concert tee, and a silver chain bisecting her lean frame.
Tattoos, too, dark ink flashing on the frame of her hands, or her left flank and she first streams past and then turns. Looks - hungry right? For something or anything, following that impinging sensation (piercing) until she meets the stranger's eyes.
Holds them, too.
She's anything but fucking shy, our Sera.
Samir[AWARENESS]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 6, 6, 7) ( success x 3 )
SamirSam's accent does not peg him as a native speaker. If anything it has a more Middle Eastern lilt to it being as he has more experience speaking Arabic than Spanish but he is from fucking Vancouver originally. Spanish with a Pacific Northwest English accent. It's out there.
It's out there and it's on a young man of average height who looks taller because of how lanky he is. His black hair is tied in a knot at the nape of his neck and his profile is handsome. Not classically so but he has strong features and bright warm eyes even in the dark. Even when the fingerprint of his magic is like a needle finding its way into a vein. A knife finding its way into flesh. Something piercing and unapologetic in its piercing.
And then their eyes meet. His gaze would be piercing to a Sleeper but Sera hasn't been asleep for a long fucking time. She's stronger than he is and growing stronger still. It doesn't quail him but it does catch his attention. It does make him look at her.
He is in fact handsome even out of profile. Young and still growing into his features. He will fade from memory just so soon as they part ways. The universe has a fucked-up sense of humor.
Oh shit say his eyes though he doesn't say anything yet. He has to finish up with Yolanda.
SerafíneOkay well you know what Sera's resonance is. She also has a ring that was consecrated by Hawksley so she's like got so much resonance going on it is pretty nuts: visceral, enthralling, liminal sun-drenched, soaring.
MAYBE SHE IS AN ARCH MAGE.
(but uh the latter stuff localizes not to her being but something on it)
SerafíneThere's a current moving around them: water streaming out to the sea, and moving against the current is far harder than moving with it, but look: she catches that gaze and sparks and turns around and breathes in and then she breathes fucking out. Laughing or something, as she stops still in the middle of that current, becomes a rocky-outcropping, a sandbar, creates her own sort of undertow. Then starts swimming against the tide, cuts through a trio teenagers tottering in too-high heels, slippery as an eel. Shorter than all of them in her silver-trimmed combat boots.
Two steps away while he's finishing with Yoland and not at all shy about listening in.
Waits her turn through, as if someone somehow somewhere had taught her some manners or maybe she simply knows better than to interrupt a deal going down.
"You're fucking new."
- is what she says to him, after.
She wants a cigarette. She wants so many things.
But right now, she's not giving in to anything, except curiousity.
SamirThey'd passed drugs for money and were just shooting the shit when Sera walked up. Yolanda likes Sam. This is their first time meeting but he's attractive and he's shy and she has impressions of him that may or may not be true. She is thanking him for coming out tonight and saying she hopes he'll be at the party next weekend and he is giving a noncommittal answer and she's walking away and then -
You're fucking new.
He saw her coming and he still startles like he'd heard a car backfire. Puts his hands into his pockets and shuffles them around he has plenty in his pockets but Sera is a wanting thing. He would take her for a homeless or an addict if it weren't for that fucking ring on her finger or the strength of her essence.
"Ah..." Uncomfortable breath of a laugh. His natural inclination is to make eye contact and yet he ducks away from it as quick as he'd duck away from a fist flying at his face. "Yeah. Good... good eye. Who're you?"
Serafíne"Serafíne." Who're you? That was easy. Sera smirks, this quick, lively little movement of her mobile mouth. On the dark, spangled street in the midst of her crowd, her dark eyes have these pinpricks of reflected light that glide she flashes him that expression. "Call me Sera."
She reaches up to grab the t-shirt from her left shoulder and tosses it over her right.
"Who the fuck are you?"
--
Samir ducks away from eye contact. God, Sera seeks it. Maybe she snags his gaze again. Maybe she's just hunting it.
SamirYoung as he is Sam is not a creature that can put up a fight for long. Nothing in his psychology to make him want to escape capture nor to give chase as a means of delayed gratification. He is self-aware and Sera can sense perhaps that he is aware of how it is he's acting and the longer they are in each other's company one with a sense of Normal and Insane can label his behavior as Insane but they are beings capable of becoming gods if they keep at it long enough. They don't have time for that shit.
He can maintain eye contact for a couple of seconds at a time before something makes him uncomfortable and he looks away. Sera does not make him uncomfortable. That's not the kind of illness he has.
Who the fuck is he.
"Samir," he says. A knee-jerk twitch of a smile that doesn't reach his eyes. "Call me Sam. You mind if I smoke?"
He has a Canadian accent. God help him.
Serafíne"You go ahead and smoke, Sam."
Though the truth is: she minds.
Or maybe she just wants, right now.
"You weren't at the show." She tells him, like maybe he needs to know. Or no, perhaps it's not that at all. "It was fucking amaze-balls. Did you really show up here just to meet that chick? Give her her shit?"
Samir[perc + empathy: because i want to see what happens]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 2
SerafíneFirst and foremost: desire. Not for any specific thing, or maybe for too many specific things, so many things all rolled together. She is hungry and she is hungry and she wants a cigarette and she wants a joint and she wants a fuck and she wants wants wants and she is: not having it. Is deliberately and decidedly not indulging. Or perhaps it is not the denial that matters, so much as the want she is cultivating, honing, sharpening until it hurts her. Until it drags her forward, upward, rising, hooks-in-skin.
So no. She actually doesn't mind, somewhere beneath all that.
SamirHere is another way a thing can pierce: in the moment his eyes meet hers when she tells him to go ahead and smoke he looks at her without Looking at her. Looks at her like he's paying attention even if that attention only lasts so long as it would last for a flashbulb to stun her sight and then it's over. Alright. She wants to mind. If he smokes it will give her denial.
Self-aware on top of everything else and he grits his teeth so he will not sigh for sighing will show what he has seen and so he fishes out a pack of cigarettes instead. He wasn't at the show.
"I don't know what you're talking about," says the shitty liar. Out comes a coffin nail and out comes the lighter. With the cigarette held down near his hip he strikes the lighter's ignition once to make sure it works. This all seems coincidental. He's talking while he does it. "She's... she was in the area, and I was in the area, and..."
Four fucking times he strikes the lighter wheel and then he hits the cigarette with the flame and inhales deep and pockets the lighter like none of this is a Thing. Blows the smoke away from Sera. He can't stop looking at her and yet he has trouble maintaining the looking.
Sigh. Now he sighs.
"Who was playing tonight?"
Serafíne"You're a shitty liar," so she declares, and truth it must be. She's a truth-teller, or maybe she's ust a shitty liar herself. Takes one to known one, right? Still, that crawling half-smile, the cut of her ribs beneath her skin, chin rising, eyes half-closing, inhaling even as he blows the smoke away from her because fuck, isn't that what she's looking for? The space between who she is and who She is. The space between. A kind of shimmy-shrug meets both his sigh and the question that cuts in after the sigh: who was playing?
"Glass Animals and TV on the Radio. Show opened with the reunion of this local band that apparently used to play out all the time like fifteen years ago, Odor of Pears."
Doesn't really always believe in personal space, Sera. She's showing that now, squeezing closer, grinning up at him. Blond curls damp with sweat, her spare ( - wasting - ) frame gleaming with it.
"Next time come inside okay? I promise you'll have a good time."
SamirA normal person might have crouched into a defensive posture but Sam is an honest sort. That's what makes him a shitty liar. She calls him on it and he stands still a moment like he isn't used to being in the presence of someone who will call him on his shit and then he lets the ghost of a laugh leave his lungs. Easy to lose since he takes a drag off the cigarette a second later and then the pocketing of the lighter and the sighing and and and.
When he sighs it's not because of her but because of the shit with the lighter. Might sound like it's because of her. Either way he changes the subject.
And then she's in his space and he lets her get there because maybe he never learned what the fuck personal space was. Doesn't invade other people's but doesn't push other people out of his either. She can see he's uncomfortable though. Shitty liar. Lots of things make him uncomfortable. He's staring her in the eye the entire time she's next to him though. Proximity makes it harder to look away.
She promises he'll have a good time.
He swallows thick and tries to look like a man who has confidence in himself. Stands up a hair straighter and grits his teeth again. He looks like he could still be a teenager but for the hardness of his bones and the implication of muscle underneath his clothes.
"O--" Yeah. Nailing it. Something catches in his throat so he swallows and tries again: "Okay. Sure."
cockroach[You guys mind a PC drive-thru?]
SerafíneI wouldn't mind but I am going to bed! after my next post. hah. so tired.
Samir[I'm good for about another hour or so.]
cockroach[It's a one-post thing. Possily with meaningful eye contact.]
Serafínethen slide on in!
Steel[Awareness?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
SteelA shadow passes through the crowd. The shadow has been creeping through the city for the past few days, now. Searching, but not for anything concrete or specific. More of a concept. Safety. Maybe even home, although it would take a long time before anything becomes even close to being called that.
East Colfax has finally drawn her in. It’s not a nice area. Letting agents might try selling it to the unsuspecting as Edgy, Happening, and other euphemisms that skirt around the fact that this probably isn’t a place many would want to live if they could possibly help it. Who would to trip over drug addicts, gang bangers, prostitutes, turf wars, psychiatric cases and the homeless just to get to the bus stop?
But even within shitholes, there are places that attract traffic and places that rarely see people. Because they’re run down and dangerous, because they’re in a patch of territory that’s dangerous to get to. Hell, because they’re just one of those places that people avoid.
Maybe it’s one of those places she’s seeking as she works her way through the unexpected crowd. But there’s something – two somethings – in the crowd that distract and divert and get her attention. A beacon of sensation. Something sharp and piercing, not entirely unlike… Unlike someone she’s acquainted with.
So there’s a figure – most likely a woman, the bumps seem to be in the right places – looking directly at Sera and Samir as they share their quiet conversation. It’s not for long, and she doesn’t approach. She doesn’t know them, and she still doesn’t feel safe. She’d been freaked out by how she’d been uncovered a few days ago, and she’s not planning on risking that again. Not yet. The thinning sea of people is a shield and she plans to disappear back into the night before that shield vanishes.
Serafíne"Hah." She says: both a laugh and a word, her mouth, see, opening. The flash of her teeth framed by the remnants of lipstick, chin high, head thrown back. The tangle of her hair snaking down her back. She seems intense and wanton and wanting and also: delighted.
Simply, uncomplicatedly, delighted.
Poor uncomfortable Sam.
He exhales these clouds-of-smoke and she inhales them and she doesn't really want that kind of ordinary cigarette but still she inhales like there is some kind of fine perfume threading through the air.
More strangers streaming by: couples holding hands, groups commenting volubly on the show, the setlist, the staging, taking and posting selfies, pulling old friends and half-remembered strangers in for a clasped forearm and a bro-hug or maybe even a real one.
Sera, smiling up at Sam, insinuates herself even closer, though somehow it all feels accidental. When there are this many strangers around aren't you meant to shimmy forward, to turn aslant and half-flatten your body to let them pass? Except she's doing that and lifting her bare arms and the t-shirt is sliding from her shoulder and she's reaching up to anchor it, to steady it, and then she's just reaching up, sidling, sliding her bare arms around his neck, lifting her mouth to kiss him quite openly on his, if he doesn't turn away.
Inhales the nicotine-laced breath from his lungs, if only in passing.
Lingers.
Lingers.
Lingers.
Then breaks away: "Awesome. Next time - " like a promise, a pledge in her pocket. "See you around Sam."
She steps around him, then. Joins the crowd. Drifts away.
SamirFor the record: Sam can count on one hand the number of traditionalists he has met who did not subscribe to technomancy. He cannot boast the ability to identify them by their own names but he could tell them for what they were because of their alienness. Their physicality or their wildness or what have you.
Sera does not bump that count onto his second hand. Also for the record.
She is right up in his space and his experience would tell him she is going to stay just right where she is and that is going to be the end of it. Experience doesn't mean dick to people who stay inside and learn the world through computer screens but Sam would never call himself an experienced man anyway. Smart sure but not experienced.
And Sera is a little bit older than him.
So alright they're in a crowd people are bumping into each other that's why he avoids crowds he doesn't know where their hands have been or what's riding on their breath and Sera isn't a Sleeper but she is a stranger. Something in her that he trusts enough to let her get close enough to loop her arms around his neck or maybe he's just human and hasn't learned to divorce himself from the necessity of physical contact.
Still. Her mouth on his neck and he was not expecting that. She can hear the reflexive sharp breath and the intellectual tamping down of it. The wait. The what the fuck. Then she breathes and he breathes and alright. His hand never finds her body because of the stun her mouth leaves him in. Tension coursed all up through his spine and his shoulders. She needs this.
Now he needs to go home and beat off about four times before he can go to sleep. Thank you Sera.
Sam swallows the serotonin out of his throat and says, all faux confidence, she isn't going to remember him by sight alone anyway so he doesn't believe her even if she thinks she's telling the truth, "Y... yeah. Okay. See you."
Oh hi Cigarette how are you let's get the fuck out of here.
No comments:
Post a Comment