[Per+alert, pay attention to the road, kid, +2 diff(App4 chick sunbathing is distracting)]
Dice: 6 d10 TN8 (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7) ( botch x 2 )
Elijah[Dex+athletics- I meant to do that]
Dice: 4 d10 TN7 (2, 4, 9, 9) ( success x 2 )
ElijahSerafine is sunbathing somewhere in the park.
Elijah had been running, not that he is a particularly adept runner, or really even particularly remarkable in regards to his relative speed, but he does happen to last a little longer than most people would in this weather. He wasn't the kind of guy who would train for a marathon, but something got stuck in his head that made him want to- namely, being stuck in a class about gemstones referred to as "Rocks for Jocks" and being told that there was no way in Hell that he could actually survive running a marathon without tapping out or throwing up. Seeing as how he was never one to settle for being told he couldn't do something, he was out running.
He was running and he'd come across Serafine sunbathing. Now, grant you, he's seen Sera in relative states of mostly dress or dress that rounds up to being clothing but there's a point when you're running or exercising that your brain goes fuck this nonsense, you need to put your energy into moving and not thinking. And eventually, you hit the point where the only thing your brain can process is obscenities and breathing. And in that moment, amidst his running, amidst the appreciation of whatever she'd been wearing and wherever his imagination was going, Elijah failed to notice that there was a park bench in front of him.
Which he ran headlong into.
Tumbled. Rolled, rolled, rolled some more and almost took out a cyclist who happened to be passing on the trail. The cyclist veered, nearly toppling into a tree but, instead, heading straight for the bushes, which made someone making out with his girlfriend (second base, wooo!) squeak the sound that a romantically frustrated teenager can make. The chain reaction was set into motion and Elijah, for his part, was content to sit on the ground and be torn between Serafine, who is sunbathing, and the chaos he caused.
"Hi."
SerafíneWhat she is wearing is a cheetah print bandau style bikini top and a pair of daisy dukes, unzipped and unbuttoned, so short that the pockets are visible below the hem of the shorts. Some sort of bikini bottom beneath, slightly mismatched from the top. Her skin loves the sun, absorbs it and reflects it back into the world. She is beautifully tan everywhere one can see, and her dyed-blond hair is brighter for the sun in the sun. Or perhaps the bleaching is recently refreshed.
There she is, sunglasses covering her eyes, hair pulled back, feet bare, flat on the slightly nubby surface of an old white coverlet turned picnic blanket, alone for the nonce. There's a picnic basket at the foot of the blanket, closed right now. No visible evidence to show how much she's still hurting.
But she is.
"Hi."
Okay, moving a little slow as she turns her head to regard Elijah, neatly ignoring the chaos too.
Maybe she's hung over.
"You put on
Serafíne"You put on quite a show."
Elijah"They totally just put park benches in random places sometimes, It's a city initiative," or I totally wasn't paying attention to the fact that there was a park bench in front of me and I caused the human equivalent of a five car pileup. He smiles, something bright and shameless, because he didn't have time to be ashamed right now of being just a tad unobservant.
He catches that she's moving a little slowly, though, cocks his head tot he side but doesn't say anything. There's lots of reasons a person could be moving slowly, right? His first thought is that she's moving hangover slow, but then again- has he ever seen Sera hung over? Wouldn't magic kind of negate the need for having a hangover unless one wanted a hangover?
He does get up, grass stains on his knees and he'll no doubt end up with a bruised elbow, or bruises somewhere because he'd actually been making decent stride before the unfortunate meeting with a parkbench occurred.
"But yeah, I... uh... that was completely unintentional. The you can't run a marathon gauntlet has been thrown, once Dan and I went out when I'd had a shit night sleeping and we hiked and just did shit and it was meditative so I figured that running could actually be a good alternative to getting shithoused regularly."
Serafíne"Mmm." She hums back. Agreement or acceptance or something of virtually everything he said. This hum that is physical and sub-liminal, somehow. Held in the instertial space that always feels somehow beneath her skin but above her body, this framing awareness of the world she carries like a second skin.
"I like to rockclimb. Jim was into yoga in the fucking park. Are you really thinking about training for a marathon? You might want to take up something safer than running, yeah?"
Elijah"Given my propensity for running into things?"
Serafíne"Naw. Given the universe's propensity for throwing park benches right in front of you."
This quick skim of her mouth, the briefest flash of her teeth behind glossed lips: perfection.
Elijah"The universe just knows- Poirots and park benches are natural enemies," he grins, playful, brushes off his knees and checks out the slight scrape on one of his elbows. "I like the idea of trail running. It's running, but through nature. Or those obstacle courses people do? Those seem cool, but I figure why fuckin' climb a fake tree when you can climb an actual tree."
Scoots over, carefully pets her hand for a moment before settling in, comfortable, nearby. He establishes where he is, what the space is, whatever comes next.
"I didn't know you rock climbed," he said.
SerafíneThat draws out her smile again: quick and sure. Almost viciously confident, the slash-and-draw of it beneath the bright, reflective opacity of her dark glasses. Something animal about it, even with the sort of slow-glandular movement that most people assume is the visible evidence of one of those knock-you-on-your-ass hangovers. Maybe an acid hangover.
Elijah pets her hand, which she finds a little bit weird, but doesn't seem to mind, and settles in. Probably on the expanse of that nubby coverlet. There's room for another body, another several bodies, that hasn't been filled yet.
"There's a helluva lot you don't know about me, kid."
Says our Sera, who is older than he is and rough-voiced today, muscles bunching in her stomach as she shifts her body to sort of lean in his direction.
"The idea of it and the fact of it are pretty different things. If you like the idea, fuck. Give it a try. Maybe you'll like the idea of it more than the fact of it. Maybe you'll like the fact of it more than the idea of it. Then you'll know."
ElijahThere's a helluva lot you don't know about me, kid.
"Do I get to find out?" the immediate response. Doesn't seem keen on not knowing something, but is incredibly interested in the idea of finding things out. Sera defies definition, she just is and there's layers. Beyond that, there's delight in his voice, somewhere in his eyes that make them more green than amber and the south creeps in because- well, because. Doesn't need a reason to have origins.
"I think I like the idea of a lot of things, but find myself missing the mark on the actuality of them. I didn't think I'd like camping though, and I fucking love camping so maybe trail running will be like that," he said, paused and grinned, "about a week ago I ran into this one chick and we ended up racing in the forest, she was like this wood nymph- I think she's still in my phone. I figure if trail running is anything like that, I'll like it."
A second, then?
"I'd like to find out more about you, at least. I want to know a person and not the idea of a person."
Serafíne"If I were you I'd stick to chasing wood nymphs over mere trail running any day. If that girl's in your phone you should give her a call. See if she wants to race through the forest again. See where it leads."
This neat little shrug of her shoulders, mild, incisive, the movement cushioned at the edge of her range of motion because: ow. Ow ow ow.
"Or where it ends."
She looks: up then, and then, away. Back towards the sky where the failing sun reflects in the dark surface of her lenses. Doesn't seem at first to be reactive or reacting to his comment that he wants to know a person and not the idea of a person, except:
"Alright. Ask me any question you want. I'll answer. Anything in the fucking world."
ElijahAsk her anything?
It's not a moment where the gauntlet is thrown, not something that seems like a challenge- an aha, I can ask whatever I want! moment. Not a triumph, just an offer. He perks up, but for all his delight and eagerness he's hesitant. There's no room for hesitation, though. Not in his mind, at least.
But he hesitates anyway. Any question, and she'd answer.
"What is..." he stops, "is it weird that now that I have the opportunity to ask anything I don't know what to ask?" Laughs because it's disarming, laughs to himself more than anything,. more an exhalation of breath than laughter.
"What do you dream about?"
Serafíne"Which dreams do you mean?"
The glasses give nothing of her eyes away but oh there goes her mouth, the slow-burn-crawl of it, just at the corners and nothing more. There go her straight little brows, rising into a brief but thoroughly eloquent arch, which is more challenge that query.
"The kind that crawl across the surface of your brain at night, and linger in the morning like a half-remembered cigarette? Or the ones you cultivate yourself, watching the light drift across the surface of a cup of tea, while the world slides by?"
Her shrug is shortened, arrested. The motion inhibited by a deep, dull, healing ache.
Hangovers.
Gotta be.
Elijah"Like, the ones that pop in your head at night and disappear the next morning if you don't quite grab hold of them fast enough. The this is my aim for a better world and this would make me happy to see into fruition works, too, but specifically I was thinking about the sleeping ones," he tells her.
She's gotta be hungover, he thinks, but he's got delight written on his face and takes her in while she's still processing the day through hazy ouchness.
Has to be a hangover. But, he asks anyway.
"By the way, you want Tylanol or something? I'm pretty sure I've got some in the car."
Serafíne"That's sweet, kiddo." Wry. This humming awareness in her voice, a throaty affection. "But I don't think Tylenol'll do much for me. I got my ass kicked by reality, not booze."
Neat little curl of her shoulder, then, a herky-jerk motion that stitches the joint back into place and tugs the nubby coverlet as it happens.
"Hawksley once told met that he'd dreamed of flying since he was a baby. You know: taking off, climbing up into the sky, soaring. Not just daydreaming, you know? Night-dreaming too. Night-dreaming first, I fucking think, like this piece of his soul that had to work its way out one way or the goddamned other.
"I never had dreams like that, thought sometimes I'd get glimpses of what-might-be, usually all wrapped up in weird half-raveled metaphors. Sometimes they'd be a little more straightforward - so obviously meaningful that it was hard to let go of even when I couldn't fucking figure it out.
"Last night I dreamt that I was walking through this spiraling cocoon of pearl, holding a baby that was either a person or a six-pack of Monk's Sour Ale, searching for Debbie Harry because I had to return her ant colony, and when I found her, every word we said to each other made sense backwards and forwards, and then Debbie was gone and I was standing in the middle of this road in a place that felt like the desert, right? That sky, those stars, that lonely fucking expanse of possibility, and there was a road and I was beside it, and I was walking because I'd been waiting for someone to pick me up, but he never came.
"So I said: fuck it, and started walking the way I wasn't supposed to go, flipping off the stupid moon."
--
"What about you? What do you dream about?"
Something in her tone - some slanting awareness, perhaps - shades that to mean: when you aren't dreaming about drowning.
Remembers that, Sera does. Is: careful around it, too.
Elijah"I kinda figured it was something? But if it was something normal I figured, hey, stuff." He tells her, keeps sitting up but eventually halfway through the story concludes that he doesn't like sitting up and looking down at her because it felt a little like he was towering. Screw being towering, there was a blanket, so it was down to the blanket. Back on the fabric, eyes at the clouds until, of course, he decides he'd rather look over at her.
He listens to the dream, acutally kind of laughs a little at part of it, some of it was absurd, some of it was... Well, he could empathize. Maybe he flipped off the moon in his dreams, too.
"I have no idea who Debbie Harry is, is she, like, GReta Garbo but less mainstream?"
--
What does he dream about?
"Mermaids, usually. Or unicorns. Once I had a dream that I was supposed to get married and I was all fuck that so I went into this forest and came across this pool of water and there was a lady in it, so I followed her. Like, I went into the water but the world turned upside down and it wasn't water and I was in, like, Gotham City and I crawled out of a puddle and kept, like, skipping between medieval fantasy world and Gotham City. And somehow I met Batman, but he stole my car because for some reason I had a car.
"The mermaid dreams usually make more sense. Like, you hit the ocean floor and everything glows blue and there's an epic battle with a giant angler fish and sometimes I don't win, and it's not like breathing is a problem? Like, the fact that we're under water doesn't even matter.
"But man, fuck angler fish. Those things are cool and creepy."
--
"Where are you from?" next, casual and curious.
SerafíneHead tipped back, fair hair rippling, mussed beneath her scalp, caught up in the texture of the picnic blanket, spare shoulders open, that suggestion of attention beneath the dark sheen of the glasses, which is always, somehow - sharper than one thinks.
"Do you think that matters?" The sloe-gin-hum of her voice. "Where a person's from?"
Elijah"It mattered to me," he said, "if it doesn't matter to you, it doesn't have to. I like knowing where people started, even, y'know, if the concept of people starting anywhere but between the Tigris and Euphrates matters much."
He takes in the details, sideward and lights bathing down from the sky. He could have,f or a moment, forgotten that she was here to enjoy the sun and he was here to ... you know... not run into park benches.
"I guess the better question is: where do you think your story starts. Doesn't have to start where you accidentally popped out."
SerafíneHer kinda-smile starts as a slice and carves itself across her neat little mouth once again and there is no particular sense of deliberation about its progress, except for the deliberate choice she makes to enjoy even this: the warmth of the sun, the reality hangover, the young man beside her who is both chaotic and strangely precise in the midst of that chaos.
"I have no fucking idea where my story starts," of course, she counters, this rough clearing-of-throat noise that is rather like a laugh. She thinks: that we, ourselves, singular and individual are least equipped to tell our own stories and she thinks, on some level, that even the concept, the conceit of that is rooted in the strangest sort of human solipsism, which somehow combines self-obsession with the ineluctable need to be seen. And it's not like she doesn't share in that need to be seen, because fuck. Look at what she's wearing. And she doesn't say any of that because she doesn't really know the word solipsism and is instead mostly think-feeling all that shit.
Complicated, see?
"My folks had two places when I was born. This apartment on the Upper East Side that was mostly my dad's during the week, and a house in Bridgehampton, where the family stayed. He'd come home, sometimes. Weekends, I guess. Went to boarding school when I was seven or eight. Then it was summers and holidays, then like, that time kinda eroded, too. School was out in the middle of fucking nowhere in the west of Ireland. This big fucking neo-Gothic mansion called Kylemore. All girls, run by nuns. Hail Mary full of fucking Grace."
Elijah"The only way that a place called Kylemore could even be remotely cool would be if the place had secret passageways and you girls had this whole Secret Garden style escape from oppressive nuns and the world blossomed into fucking technicolor as a respite for gray skies and rulers," he says, muses. builds it up because he has within him a desire to embellish things. To paint something drab a little more favorable color instead of seeing what he had been invited to see once before- something desolate. Something lonely.
It's complicated, see, when people can split time. When children are accessories or burdens.
"Nuns are fucking brutal."
Not joking. Completely serious. He's been on the wrong side of an angry nun a couple times. You don't grow up in Louisiana without brushing against Catholicism at the very least. He ruminates on this for a moment before firing back with.
"Best kiss? Or favorite?"
Serafíne"How about first?"
She tosses back. As if this were an auction, or a treaty negotiation. Mouth curled, yeah.
Always.
Elijah""First? Sold."
First?
He had tot hink about this one, could think about the first time he had sex easily enough, if only because he'd told someone, hunted through details, went back through a year book to see if he could find that girl's name out and still drew a blank.
"I was thirteen and her name was Megan. Megan was a freshman and people kinda thought she was going tyo get pregnant before she graduated and drop out or whatever, but we were in the same pottery class. Jenn didn't like her," Jenn still doesn't like her, "but I didn't think there was anythign wrong because she was cool, yeah? She went to parties with seniors and had her belly button pierced.
"Like, I knew girls were around? And I knew guys were around? The first person I wanted to kiss was James Evanson but I was pretty sure the dude who sat behind me in algebra would have kicked my ass if I kissed him so, like, second person was Jenn but I thought that's gonna be weird, you know her mom and her dad went to prison once and might actually kill you so no.
"So anyway, Megan was actually about number seven on the list of people I wanted to kiss when I was thirteen but that's totally not the point." He laughed, laughed because thirteen year old Elijah logic was, for lack of a better word, completely irrational. He shrugs, goes on through the story. Cavalier about the experience, "So Megan shows up and I'm elbow deep in clay and she tells me her parents aren't going to be home until late so I walk her home after school and she lives in the freaking swamps in this trailer park and nobody in their right mind wants to actually go there but she lives there so we're going, right?
"The house is a place straight out of the seventies, and she pops the liquor cabinet open and offers me a bottle of something that tastes like fucking rubbing alcohol. So we drink a little... or a lot... I don't know. I remember feeling really shitty, like, an hour in and she told me that this was completely normal and she ends up sitting on top of me on the couch and we kind of made out and I had no idea what I was doing but I ended up with my hand up her shirt and that was the first time that I had encountered real, non-imaginary boob so I thought I was doing pretty awesome.
"I walked home after that? It was kind of a standing arrangement after that? Tuesdays, I'd walk her home, she'd get me drunk and we'd make out on a shitty couch. Lasted about a month before she got a real boyfriend. She ended up being my dealer later."
Serafíne"Katie O'Connor. In the Chapel, this night in October. You know how the light changes in fall, right? Just kind of starts gathering itself inwards, shrinking. It's not dark all the time yet and the sun is so fucking persistent but the bite in the air, come morning. The frost from your breath.
"Goosebumps prickling up your arms as you're stumbling out of the dorm for vespers and breakfast and that sense of night around you, even when it is just incipient, the world stitching itself up at the edges.
"I had cigarettes, sometimes. One of the gardeners would bring them to me, and somehow I lifted the sacristy key right off Father Flaherty, like three fucking times, is how little attention he paid. Finally managed to make a mold from it in this old bar of soap. Communion wine is shit, man. Usually, but sometimes he'd buy himself a nice bottle and to sip on a Friday then blend in the remainder of it to be blessed.
"Fuck it, anyway. We'd sneak off to the chapel to smoke cigarettes or maybe get high. It was away from the dorms, away from the great house, down this path in the woods and we'd sit behind the altar, watching the smoke rise and mingle with the moonlight. I think the first seventeen joints I smoked were tobacco and like dried banana peel but finally we go our hands on the real thing. It was so fucking blissful.
"She fell asleep with her head on the crook between my arm and shoulder. We woke up in the predawn, shivering, it was so cold. Our breath looked like smoke.
"I kissed her, then.
"After that, we'd go to the chapel to smoke and get high and make out and I kissed her a helluva lot more. 'Til we got caught.
"She got suspended I got expelled. Because I was quote unquote incorrigible.
"She had freckles like you wouldn't believe, Katie."
ElijahHe listens to the story. To the whole of it, the ins and the outs with Katie O'Connor and the moments of rebellion and the taste of another person. The feeling of something that felt, loud and clear like it mattered. Something that pinged on his senses like romance, actual romance.
She had freckles like you wouldn't believe, Katie.
"Personally, I think incorrigible is a fucking fantastic way to be. They're implying that it's a hopeless cause, but... y'know... it's incorrigible, not to be corrected, improved, or reformed because there isn't anything there that needs to be changed."
A beat, a thought, then?
"Do you ever wake up and think you know, I'm pretty fucking awesome?"
Serafíne"I always wake up and think, you know, I'm pretty fucking awesome."
The wry curl of her mouth crawls wider. The convex surface of her dark lenses just hold his gaze, fixed and unyielding.
"Do you?"
A beat.
"Doesn't everyone?"
Elijah"It's hit and miss," he doesn't look away. She doesn't look away, and he doesn't either. Isn't going to shy away since he'd been the one who had wanted to talk about things. He'd wanted to know, so he asked, "but generally the I'm pretty neat outweighs the I'm a royal shitbag most of the time. I'm cool with the awesome-to-not ratio."
