Cooking the steaks from frozen takes forever. Long enough to search out a pair of neatly frozen and portioned sides. French green beans, long and slender, dressed lightly with olive oil, garlic, pine nuts, brought back to life with a quick, hot stir-fry on one of the many burners on that huge, professional stove. Takes a while to find the everyday silver, the napkins (linen, not paper), neatly pressed and tucked away with a refreshing sachet of something subtle, bright and clean so that they do not smell like mothballs but rather like: summer, somehow.
Outside, then, with the both of them and a bottle of red and a pair of purpose-made red wine glasses, through the dark, quiet house to the back courtyard. Low voltage lights define the still-well-groomed garden. There's an iron-work table on a brick patio overlooking the low-gleam of the outdoor pool, two chairs tipped forward, resting against the table so garden detritus does not accumulate in the seats. A trip or two, in and out, sees them settled: filet mignon, green beans, caviar and Triscuits, a small dish of olives and marinated artichoke hearts and other shelf-stable delicacies.
They look like strange refugees in a fairytale palace, something like it.
Elijah"So," he announces, because that is how one begins these types of conversations. With a hearty so and thus one will spring into action. Start talking about whatever it is they were saying. It was a punctuated so, not a drawn out type. Not the type that is expecting someone to fill in the answer, make muddy waters clear. Not that type of so.
"I have no idea whose pants I'm wearing."
An announcement. His gaze goes from Dan and briefly over to the pool. He's content to let it stay over there and he's going to stay over here and they will both be just fine, thank you very much. It's pretty, though. He can't help but find the place they're staying overwhelmingly pretty, the kind of place that you rent for a wedding- and he doesn't even know about the ballroom.
DanDan breathes out something not-quite-a-laugh. He has half a glass of wine (not drinking much, figures he'll need to give Elijah a ride home) and half-a-filet left on his plate and doesn't give much thought to the prettiness of the enormous-empty-mansion. Or weddings: Dan doesn't much think about weddings, either. But Elijah says so and it is a meaningful so and that has the other man's blond brows spiking up in inquiry before the rest of it all comes down.
Then that not-quite-a-laugh.
Thought he might get out of all this without that question, right? I mean: so far, so good.
"I'm pretty sure they're Hawksley's."
Elijah"Oh," he says, as though this is no big deal. He takes a second, as if he was going to say something, but he laughs under his breath and refrains from taking a bite of green beans, "this is proof that I would have to literally almost die to get into Hawksley's pants. And innuendo aside, these are really fucking comfortable pants."
He shakes his head, takes a bite of food and chews, swallows, "is he, like, on vacation or something? This place is a ghost town."
He has no idea that this is a bad line of questioning, but it hits him that it is once he asks. There's the awkward moment, too, the dawning on his face when Elijah figures out I probably shouldn't have asked that. He doesn't have a lot of experience with Hawksley, just a couple nights out partying- a hand full of interactions at best. Enough to know that he's young, attractive, and has enough money to have a driver. He hadn't figured that the man lived in a freaking castle, but eh? What do you do.
DanDan does not respond to the innuendo. Maybe a smirk, but a supple, elastic one that hardly breaks the shadow of his beard. He's still sitting back now, but there's something - clipped about his expression that seems reined in somehow. Leashed.
This tick of his gaze back to Elijah when the younger man asks if he's on vacation or something.
"I don't know that he's lived here for a good nine months. Last time I saw him was Thanksgiving."
Elijah[Per+empathy - waaaitaminute, what happened?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )
DanDan does not like Hawksley.
He's trying to be diplomatic because he's a fucking diplomat but he's just angry with the dude. That anger has had some time to change and not-precisely-soften but tenderize - like circumstances yadda but he still can't help it. He's plain old angry with Hawksley.
--
And Elijah isn't reading his mind so he doesn't really know what happened but what he gets - clear and raw and immediate - is that Dan is angry with Hawksley and it obvs has to do with Sera, and also: Dan is trying very hard to be careful with that and get a handle on that, also because of: Sera.
But fuck: right now, Dan cannot stand the guy.
Elijah"Ah," a brief, punctuated answer peppered with the realization that this is a line of questioning that could go very bad, very quickly and he knows that Dan is diplomatic. He knows that Dan is pissed off at Hawksley, but he doesn't quite know the reason. Doesn't know how to ask where he went, but the guy literally just up and left his house to do something and-
"Sera's holding up okay, right?"
It's clear, at that juncture, that the question means two different things. He's leaning less on the fact that Sera is upstairs and probably sleeping off what the universe did as retribution for her actions (was it worth it? Not Elijah's question to answer), and more on the fact that something clearly happened between Hawksley and Sera that was bad enough to even make Dan- who is arguably one of the most non angry people Elijah knows- furious with the owner of the house.
"What happened?"
Just because Elijah shouldn't ask doesn't mean that he won't, though.
DanDan breathes out hard, once. Straightens and flicks a glance back at the young man who very nearly died tonight. Threw himself in front of a strange as a damned human shield. Dan thinks: maybe Elijah shouldn't've done that, but he's said it once already tonight. Doesn't need to say it again.
This deliberative moment, a kind of weighing-of-things, and Dan has put down his fork and picked up his glass. Maybe he'll drink more than one glass of red wine. Maybe they'll get Elijah a taxi home.
Considers. Grimaces, this little spasm of something wry and strange.
(Elijah, keyed in as he is to every nuance of expression that beard is capable of, also gets that: outside of the anger, separate and apart from the anger (because they are separate things), Dan also: sympathizes, empathizes, something for Hawksley too. Doesn't shift away his anger, though. Doesn't really dent it at all.)
--
"Sera had a hard year," sharp breath out, "But yeah, she's okay."
(The last bit is both: true and not-true, and Dan is perfectly aware of both the truth of it and the not-truth of it and that awareness of Dan's is plain as everything else Elijah has seen in him tonight.)
"Sorry, I'm trying to figure out - how much to say, really. The short story is: Alicia disappeared and he spent some time looking for her, then family obligations pulled him back east. What happened is - he didn't fucking tell Sera.
"Just disappeared. Maybe he'd respond to a text now and then - but fuck. One day he was here, the next he was gone.
"She was pretty broken-up about it. Even if she was trying not to be."
ElijahHe gets the basic run down, and is keyed in. Paying attention to the little twitches in expression, the nuance of it all. There are truths there, layers there because nothing is ever clear cut and dry. Nothing is ever straightforward and he knows it. Sometimes, Elijah has a good sense for people, and something it lets him know that things are a lot more complicated than he can really fathom.
"That had to be hard," he says, "someone you care about just being there one minute and being gone the next. Things were pretty messed up back in November, I would have been worried out of my damn mind."
He's learning- things are always pretty messed up.
"I'm guessing he's not coming back any time soon," and he can guess that he and Sera must have been pretty damn close, given that she had the key to his house. Can come and go at will. That implies a fair degree of familiarity. Perhaps he assumes they were (are- because it's Sera, he can't imagine her writing people off) friends. The kind of friends that he and Jenn are, puts it into perspective. (Perhaps some introspection of some of the less-than-considerate things Elijah had done to Jenn. She moves halfway across the country for him, and he shuts her out for six months. Said she was fine, that things are good now because they're being open and honest but... he imagines, briefly, what that must have felt like.)
"That's pretty messed up." Finality, that.
Dan"She was abandoned by her folks when she was a kid," Dan doesn't really - remember what was messed up about November. What was really messed up about his November was that: Sera was gone, off to London and quite on her own, for reasons he knows perfectly well, which he isn't sharing now, even when he is sharing so much else.
"They sent her off to boarding school overseas. The first couple years they brought her back for winter break, maybe a bit of summer vacation, but those visits home kinda fell by the wayside. So being treated like that by the man she loves - "
He breaks off. Said too much, probably. Maybe it's the brush with his own damn mortality. That sort of thing will do it to you.
"They made up." That much Elijah could easily guess. Sera wears a ring with Hawksley's resonance written into the substance of the metal. Consecrated. "Or what the fuck ever."
Elijah"Makes it just kinda par for the course," he says, like that makes it make sense. Like maybe he understands on some conceptual level- that this could be what Sera expects from people who are supposed to love her. They're supposed to see you when they think it's convenient, they're supposed to flitter in and out of your life like you're an accessory. A car. A house. Serafíne.
But, he doesn't know. Doesn't know if it hurts to think about, if she feels like she's lost or abandoned or floating out in the wilderness. Doesn't know if she would open the door wide open- except he does. Except he suspects that she would, because they made up. Or what the fuck ever. She carries a piece of Hawksley around with her so he's always there, so it's not like he left, so it's not like he just ran off and did what the fuck ever it was he was doing without telling her.
Yeah.
Elijah can kind of figure how Dan would be pissed.
He takes a drink of wine, not the kind of drink that one does when they're just tasting it and certainly not the kind of drink one takes when they're drinking a bottle of wine that cost as much as a crappy car. No, that's a drink to wash a taste out of his mouth. He's a book, and an easily read book at that. The wheels turn and there's pauses in his thoughts. The pauses in his speech and the way that he occasionally pins things with his gaze and thinks. Gets lost in thought.
"That's fucking bullshit," he says, and there's actual frustration, actual, legitimate anger that hints at the edges and rides there. The kind of anger that comes when you find out something and your brain is trying to process it and the only response you can have is to be angry, "she's not a fucking show pony or hood ornament or whatever."
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