Mermaid night at the Denver Aquarium is normally packed but: today is a Monday, the Monday after a holiday weekend and the place is pretty deserted, for an Aquarium featuring young women swimming in bikini tops and too-large fishtails in the shark tank.
The mermaids can be seen from both a window onto the tropical tank from the snack bar and from the walk-through tunnel, and that is where a certain someone can be found, with Dan, seated on the floor, legs curled out of the walking path, golden head tipped back against the glass, sipping on a smoothie and watching the mermaids as they swim swim swim and then - dart back to their O2 hoses - and swim some more.
Elijah[WP: because all this water is totes fine]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )
ElijahElijah Poirot had a thing for mermaids.
It wasn't a fetish. It wasn't a sexual desire of any kind, it was a deep, abiding love. SOmething that skewed more towards the conceptual instead of the literal. He loved them in ways that his young heart had first learned to love, with quiet awe and wonder. Looking on at pictures with scales and hair and seashells. Then with respect at stories of ships crashing and sirens, and then with aching bleeding, pleading something that he couldn't put into words at the time at the notion of forbidden affections-0 separated by the land and sea. He'd read the LIttle Mermaid, the one that wasn't from Disney. THe one where she died and fell into sea foam.
Something hurt at the notion, something hoped it wasn't real but again knew in that youthful way that it had to have been true. He still held out the belief that mermaids might be real, did not seek them for neverending youth, but rather, because he wanted to know if the stories were true.
These weren't real mermaids. Not really, they were just people with tails but he was fascinated all the same, quiet and delighted in a pair of slacks and a vest- because where else would his pocket watch go? He'd gotten off work late, sent text messages in hopes that someone- anyone- may come and share in the quiet delight.
He'd gotten off work late, but came to the glass anyway like some delighted pilgrim. He settles in, takes a seat with the duo like he belonged there.
"Did I miss anything?"
SerafíneDan has an arm around Sera's shoulders, and she is in turn resting against his body. Hair pulled back into a complicated series of plaits and French braids, which make her look just a bit like some cable TV idea of a Viking warrior. Black leather jacket over an American flag bikini top and a pair of denim cut-offs, perhaps in homage to the Independence Day holiday.
--
It is Dan who looks up; tracks Elijah's path down the tunnel. Gives him a mild smirk of greeting and acknowledgment.
"They're swimming," says Dan, quietly and yes, with a certain degree of irony.
"Third one from the left skates roller derby," Sera informs them both, which is true.
Then Dan: "Didn't you invite us to come see mermaids last year? What's your thing with them, anyway?"
Elijah"I did," he confirmed for Dan, "and it's a thing, the whole grace under water, the ability to explore this whole vast, almost alien landscape- the ocean is intense. Even if mermaids were freshwater lake creatures there's still stories of catfish so big at the bottom that you have fish whose eyes are the size of dinner plates. The lure of an entirely different world that exists just barely out of your reach if you could hold your breath long enough or withstand the pressure."
He leans back, crosses his legs at the ankle, "then there's the whole myth of the mermaid human love affair of things that can't be, broken hearts and sea foam and it's fucking tragic.
"Plus, it's just a beautiful image, if something can ever be just beautioful, ya know?"
Serafíne"You know that you have all of those things," Sera, quiet, contemplative, humming beneath her breath, beneath her skin, somewhere in the skein of her spare frame, all blood-and-bone and whip-lean muscle. "Here and now, right? Without the fucking ocean.
"Almost sounds like a metaphor for the life you've found your way to live, doesn't it?"
Magick, she means: of course, magick. The poetry and the tragedy and the beauty of it. They're in public, though. Strangers drifting through, glancing down at the probably-drunk (she is not drunk) collection of misfits and reprobates seated on the floor of the tunnel.
Dan offers, then - "Love affairs that can't be aren't really tragic, though - When you're inside them, they just fucking suck."
Elijah"It's probably pretty close, but thus far I haven't drowned any hapless well-intentioned mortals by attempting to share the majesty of where... actually... I don't think I can actually say that," he says. He has to think, has to wonder for a second about Jenn, if she had actually been-
Fuckit. He stood by the decision to show her the umbra, to share something, to try and make the world make sense and she wasn't drowning yet, was she? She wasn't overwhelmed yet (not entirely), she wasn't floating face down or lungs bursting because the pressure was too much. No, she was here. She was fine.
"I think it's the trying to make them be that can- well, I guess that could- you know, I don't actually have the experience to back that up either," he says, admits without admitting because he's shameless and why should he be? "I'd say tragedy of any kidn just sucks when you're in it. Tragedy's a word for other people to describe someone else's problem."
Serafíne"Technically," Dan here, wry. "Tragedy is the framing of a story that gives its readers a degree of catharsis by evoking in them the same sort of emotions imputed to the principles, but from a safe distance and presumably with a secondary degree of safety, in that those emotions are shared with the whole of the audience. In the Greek sense, usually some hero brought down by a fatal flaw in his own character instead of the random action of chance."
Sera rolls her eyes are Dan's technical definition of tragedy, Greek or otherwise. Uncurls her legs and shifts her body, both only to settle more comfortably against him.
"I wasn't suggesting you drowning people, Elijah. Just that everything you love about their world - minus the dubiously poetic murder - exists in this one and always has. Even before you opened your eyes."
Quiet, briefly. Then - "Have you thought about that chat we had the other night?"
Elijah"It didn't used to be something separate. LIke... the whole wonder of it. It just kinda... went... one day, and nothing felt like anything but then it came back and... Yeah," exhales like that is that. A long conversation he didn't know how to have. Shame he'd be so interested in words and find so little capacity to use them.
"I did," he told her, "kind of a kick in the ass to quit coasting and... It was probably the smartest thing, and one of the most helpful things anyone has ever told me."
A little quieter, a little more honest, "if you found someone else I could talk to, I'd love the help. But if you didn't, you've already done a lot."
SerafíneDan breathes out a quiet lungful into Sera's hair. Half-a-swallowed laugh. truth is, he doesn't precisely understand what Elijah means when he says that wonder didn't used to be separate. Hard to read someone else's shorthand, perhaps harder when that person is full of their own experiences, strange and dangerous, and has the ability to change reality with the application of will.
Sera doesn't quite understand either, but she kinda hums. That's what you do right, when you are stoned and struggling for words to explain whatever the fuck it is that you are feeling, sharing with each other. Gives Dan an upward tilt of her chin and a quick little warning glance.
"I made a call," she tells the young would-be Hermetic. Does not tell him: to whom, or what that person means to her, meant to her. "Someone I know in England. He's not entirely awake, you know? But not asleep precisely, either. Kind of a functionary, but he's gonna get in touch with some folks about you.
"Hopefully that'll help you find the path."
--
Not much more, really. Dan and Sera hang out a bit longer. It feels like sitting around passing around a roach at the tail-end of the night. Soon enough though, Dan looks at his watch and rouses Sera: they have to go. No more mermaids tonight. Night, Elijah.
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