Two weeks ago Samir was following Serafíne down a wooded path to the top of a hill after running into her at a corner store. The trip was precarious and she was stoned and he was not. They sat at the top of the hill and they watched the fireworks and Samir did not think himself brave even though by anyone else's definition of the word he was. He sat close to the Cultist and if she tried to touch him he let her.
Brave but not bold. Their interlude ended with them going their separate ways.
They're on a date right now. Or 'meeting up for coffee.' A coffee date. The place is called Rooster & Moon. Samir is wearing an untucked button-down shirt instead of a leather jacket overtop a t-shirt. His hair is tied back as it usually is. For a Sunday night the place is pretty busy.
Underneath the table Samir is joggling his right foot. He ordered a pot of green tea. He's already had one cup by the time they reach this point in the conversation. He's trying to be like present and shit.
"So..." Brilliant. "I'm just curious: how long've you lived here?"
SerafíneIt's night time, or well - evening, sun still in the sky but falling now, bright in the west, long shadows falling everywhere else. Not quite dusk yet - that's still a couple of hours away. Summer's like that, nearly endless days, but there's no need for sunglasses inside, except Sera's wearing them. Of course.
Shouldn't surprise Samir.
He's a drug dealer, after all.
What might be surprising is that the girl across from him - who looks like an aficionado of the heavily caffeinated, heavily syruped, heavily frothed coffee-as-dessert drinks also ordered tea. Not green but: black.
Darjeeling, in point of fact.
Absent whiskey, she takes it with a spot of milk, not cream, and drinks it from a proper cup-and-saucer when and whereever possible.
Rooster and Moon has proper cup-and-saucers, so. That's nice.
Looks a bit absurd, the girl in the little pink dress (bumble! bees!) and thigh-high suspendered fishnets torn to all fuck and sunglasses and piercings, hands dark and darting with ink, drinking tea from a proper cup-and-saucer, but there you go.
"Fuck if I know," Sera allows her attention to drift: outside, their reflections skimmed over the strangers on the sidewalk gives her a certain kind of sober pleasure. She's looking for something, too - but aren't we all? "Couple years, maybe a bit more than that. Kinda made it home. One of my bandmates has family around here, and had this house she inherited when her aunt passed. So the rest of us kinda - tagged along.
"Feels like I found my place, even when are pieces that are missing, you know?
"What about you? I don't think you ever told me what brought you to Denver?"
SerafíneIt's night time, or well - evening, sun still in the sky but falling now, bright in the west, long shadows falling everywhere else. Not quite dusk yet - that's still a couple of hours away. Summer's like that, nearly endless days, but there's no need for sunglasses inside, except Sera's wearing them. Of course.
Shouldn't surprise Samir.
He's a drug dealer, after all.
What might be surprising is that the girl across from him - who looks like an aficionado of the heavily caffeinated, heavily syruped, heavily frothed coffee-as-dessert drinks also ordered tea. Not green but: black.
Darjeeling, in point of fact.
Absent whiskey, she takes it with a spot of milk, not cream, and drinks it from a proper cup-and-saucer when and whereever possible.
Rooster and Moon has proper cup-and-saucers, so. That's nice.
Looks a bit absurd, the girl in the little pink dress (bumble! bees!) and thigh-high suspendered fishnets torn to all fuck and sunglasses and piercings, hands dark and darting with ink, drinking tea from a proper cup-and-saucer, but there you go.
"Fuck if I know," Sera allows her attention to drift: outside, their reflections skimmed over the strangers on the sidewalk gives her a certain kind of sober pleasure. She's looking for something, too - but aren't we all? "Couple years, maybe a bit more than that. Kinda made it home. One of my bandmates has family around here, and had this house she inherited when her aunt passed. So the rest of us kinda - tagged along.
"Feels like I found my place, even when are pieces that are missing, you know?
"What about you? I don't think you ever told me what brought you to Denver?"
Sam"A plane."
He isn't trying to be cute or charming or funny. If anything he looks nervous but then he always looks a bit nervous. His hands smell like isopropyl alcohol gel and he keeps his nails trimmed so close to the quick it's a wonder he doesn't nick them more often.
It's worth mentioning that though Sera has caught him selling drugs before she has not yet caught Samir under the influence of anything. Even the night they drank Hendrick's and tonics he didn't get drunk.
"I just... I don't know, I got used to moving around a lot, growing up, and I had a falling out, sort of, with my..." He clears his throat. His eyes dart around the room. Paranoia in a person too young to remember the Ascension War is somehow more potent. It's also worth mentioning that he chose the seat that puts his back to the wall and not a door. "With my people back in Los Angeles, so I just sort of... randomly picked a place. I like it so far, it's just... different. A lot different."
SerafíneA plane he says, not trying to be cute, but there's this moment where she glances at him, her neat little mouth already carving a smirk across her face, her brows lifted because swear to god, Sera hates those obvious fucking jokes when they are tossed back to her full of self-satiated whimsy. Loves them a little, too: awkward and obvious and human.
So, for a moment her great-big-reflective-but-not-mirrored sunglasses are trained on Samir, hovering so neatly they seem to splice the moment in two. Then like a check, like a tick before a tock, the half-smirk breaks into something altogether else.
Gentler, perhaps even bemused.
"What sort of falling out? Physical or philosophical?"
She takes a sip of tea.
Sam"Heh..."
He looks down at his cup and twirls it around on the saucer a few times. Though he gave it a cursory inspection earlier his eyes are on the rim of the ceramic like he might have missed something anyway. Like it's easier to look at an inanimate object than her sunglasses.
Not that she hasn't got eyes beneath the sunglasses. Samir may be awkward but he doesn't lack empathy. Easier to look at a cup than her sunglasses because looking at her sunglasses is too confessional for him.
"It, ah... started out philosophical. A bit. Then it turned physical. That's... it's kind of a long story, and it's boring, and..." He chews on his lip one two three times before forcing himself to find Sera's gaze beneath the plastic lenses. A self-depreciating huff of a laugh. "It's probably better for me to be by myself, for a while, anyway. You know? You spend your whole... awakened life around the same people, it's hard to tell if you're actually forming your own beliefs or just... going along with what everyone else is doing... and... I... am talking a lot. What..." He clears his throat again. "What makes you feel like that? That you found your place?"
Serafíne"Mmmph." This sound she makes, not precisely of agreement so much as consideration. Brightlined beneath it, something else, inward, focused. Tender in the strangest of ways. "Finding your own way. That's something I can fucking get behind."
Her mouth curves again, quick and slicing.
"Not that I have much in common with your people. Bet you I wouldn't begin to understand what the whole falling-out was about anyway."
Then, "Fuck if I know. It just feels like that. You wanna hear this thing Rick told me once?"
SamHis eyes tick off to the side like he's parsing his memory for a definition of Rick. Either he finds one or he decides it's not worth it to stop and ask. Rick is one of her bandmates. Samir hasn't met him yet.
Then he looks back at her.
"Lay it on me."
Serafíne"So like there was this study, right? That these folks did at Duke, where they'd bring a bunch of college students in to a room and give them a choice between two posters and the students got to take home the poster that they picked.
"One of the posters was one of those dumb-ass pictures of a kitten hanging from a door or something that said HANG IN THERE right? And the other was some kinda fine art. Monet or Klimt or whatever. The first group of kids they studied had to pick their favorite of the two, but were also told that they were going to have to explain why they liked it. The second group were told that they just had to pick their favorite poster. No one made them explain why they liked it, right?"
Breath.
"And the first group, the ones who had to explain, way more of them picked the stupid kitten poster because that was easier to explain. Hey! Hang in there! I wanna hang in there! And they liked the poster at first, but six months later when they were asked whether they still liked it most of them didn't, not as much, not really.
"The second group, though, the ones who didn't have to explain why they liked the poster they picked, more of them picked the Monet or the Klimt or what have you. And six months later, they were still happy with their choice.
"Which kinda means, that people have more complex tastes than they necessarily or understand and can explain, right? More sophisticated tastes, really. The capacity for - fuck if I know - a higher life than they really know. And that explaining things is fucking hard. And I probably could still tell you why it feels like home, and also why it doesn't, but it'd be easier to show you.
"I'm having a party next week. Why don't you come?"
SamAnd he was following along with her for most of the explanation. Hard to tell if Samir is a smart guy or if he's just sort of stumbling along through life hoping for the best. A lot of their lot tend to be smart because of Darwinian biophysics but a lot of them have the capacity to be just as willful in their ignorance as the typical Sleeper. Samir doesn't talk very much and when he does he sounds uncomfortable. He eases into socialization the more they talk but it has to feel like someone's hit a restart button every time Sera runs into him.
Zones of comfort. Every time she meets him out in public he's already outside of his. No time for mental preparation. That's something he's working on.
He nods his head when Sera explains what Rick's story about the Duke study means. Consciousness and self-awareness and so on and so forth. She wants to show him.
When delayed panic hits him like the spray from a violent surf Sera sees it in his eyes. They are the colour of whiskey in this light. Warm and sharp and yet antiseptic. His heart rate just took off. A party. Fuck.
"I..." Internal stammering. He stammers a bit aloud too. Then he pulls his shit together: "... don't... have a good reason why not. What day are you having it?"
SerafínePer + Empathy because...
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 6, 6, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 7 ) [Doubling Tens]
SerafíneShe is - aware.
Without thought, without design, and sometimes virtually without flaw, she is aware, and she is aware of him now. The awkward beat followed by a roil of panic, the stammering - internal, external. The beating of his heart. She takes all of that - and more - in with a glance that is little different, perhaps only a beat more measured, than any of her other glances. The dark frame of her sunglasses above the smooth curve of her cheekbone. The line of her profile made lambent by the window beside which she sits. The lilt of her chin, the twist of her mouth, all of this hanging for a moment, or two, or three.
Then lifting, rising as easily as paper-caught-to-flame, away.
Gently, really, "How does Friday sound?"
SamSomething about her tone tells him she isn't blind to his discomfort. Something about their slowly-growing cache of past experiences too. She's aware of him in a way that makes him uncomfortable but Samir is a private person and he's making himself uncomfortable on purpose. DIY cognitive-behavioural therapy. He knows isolation isn't good for him. It isn't good for any of them. That way lies madness.
"Friday... sounds..." Might as well be honest. He smiles and it does reach his eyes but underneath the light of it there's anxiety. Nervous laughter clotted in his throat. "... fucking terrifying. I'll be there."
The response would beg the question as to well don't you want to know where you're going. He's a Virtual Adept. He doesn't need physical addresses to find people.
Serafíne"Cool," she returns, lightly, already rising. Hem of her little-pink dress short enough that it barely covers her ass, and certainly shows off the complex little display of garters and stockings. She has a clutch on the table and reaches to pick it up, even as she is shifting around the table to brush by Samir.
Aware of his personal space and his need for it, but she cannot always help herself. Drops her free hand to the crown of his head, and then her mouth.
"We can get high or make out or something. Door's always open. See you then."
And lo, she saunters out the door.
SamFolks who get themselves addicted to substances whose absence could kill them can think they need alcohol or heroin the same way Samir can think he needs personal space. It's fear that's knit itself so snug into his pattern that he doesn't know how to think if he doesn't think of the world in terms of his fear.
Sera is aware. Maybe she doesn't have enough evidence to really draw a clear picture of what plagues the young man. Whatever it is it isn't permanent. It could be if he weren't fighting it. She can paint that stroke of him at least: whatever it is he is fighting it.
So his muscles go taut with the touch to the top of his head but he does not jolt away from it. He likes her. Sera is aware of that too.
"Alright," he says. Real smooth, Lakhani. "See ya."
He watches her walk away and then he slumps down in his chair. Sets his teeth into his knuckle like to test and make sure he's still got sensation in his extremities and then picks up his tea cup like it was somehow responsible for this.
Alright. Friday. He can pull his shit together by Friday.
And if that fails: benzos.
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