calling and not calling my ex

Serafíne

Last night Sera couldn't hold her head upright and needed repeated reminders to put on her seatbelt. Drifted the whole of the drive back to the Monaco with her temple against the cool glass and her legs drawn up but turned akimbo on the seat. Talked some between these clear, deliberate, deliberative breaths she was drawing in like she could consume something in the air itself and maybe get fractionally higher. Refused any help that might've been on offer with a stubborn, drunken persistence. Spent the first half of the night curled up more-or-less clothed in the empty bathtub attached to one of the bedrooms. Got up at six a.m. or so and puked, then crawled into bed, curled up in one corner with her stuffed rabbit. Sid sprawled on the floor at the foot of the bed. Something in that dog's history tells it that certain spaces belong to people, but the floor is always free for the taking.
--
Sera sleeps for a long-ass time. Gets up at the ass-crack of 4 p.m. or so, hung over and ready for her tea. Is about to go out into public spaces of the suite wearing panties and the hotel's silky black bathrobe, but remembers that there are more-or-less strangers around, so you know, probably they are not necessarily used to mostly-naked Cultists waking up in their space. She pulls on a worn-soft t-shirt and is now only about 65% naked. Pads out with her hair a wild tangle all around her face, scratching idly at her ass and thinking about having her tea and then: having not a goddamned thing to do with the rest of her day.

Fuck. Everything sucks.

She finds something to eat and something to toss to Sid and an abnormal amount of time trying to figure out the single-serve coffee/tea machine, feeling every inch of her hangover. What the hell else does she have to do with her day?

Michael

By the time Serafíne has crawled her ass out of bed and decided she's ready to attempt to start the day Michael has returned from whatever the hell it is he's doing with his time in Denver. It isn't seeing the sights. Not unless the sights happen to align with his mission.

Eventually he has to come back to the room and tend to his physical needs.

He's about to take off his suit jacket the second he walks into the suite. Then he sees the Cultist is stumbling around attempting to figure out life. Her options are Hang Out In The Communal Area or Retreat Back To Her Side.

"Hello, Sid!" the Euthanatos says when the dogs come over to sniff at his shoes and ankles. Crouches to greet him proper before he turns his attention to Sera. "How are you feeling?"

Serafíne

"Fucking brilliant," Sera rasps, in a voice that says she is anything but brilliant. In the interim she has gotten out both her phone and her sunglasses. The former still doesn't fucking work and she slips it back into the pocket of her robe with an almost slinking guilt. The latter she slides down from the crown of her head to shade her eyes. Nevermind that they are inside and it is October and the sun is turning its face away from the earth. "Another glorious day in paradise. Sid and I were talking about going out to Castlewood or something."

Sid, of course, is stretching, sniffing, wagging her tail. Likes it when Mike gets down on his haunches to match her, and gives him several playful sniffs before she turns in one of those playful wheel-aways like she's ready for action. Of course she is. Sera has been passed out for hours.

"Were you checking on Jenn?"

Michael

Global warming hasn't had an impact on the rotation of the earth. The days are growing shorter. They will continue to shorten until it seems as if nothing has been left behind.

Dog people are impervious to the weather. Mike is most definitely a dog person. He also seems to think that Sera was joking about going out to Castlewood. There's nothing in Castlewood but nature. That may be the sort of thing a young woman who cannot interact with other people craves. If she can't have one extreme there's always the other.

He isn't judging her. He's scratching Sid behind the ears and getting her all wound up in preparation to take her outside.

Was he checking on Jenn.

"I was," he says. Bright. It seems as though Jenn is in good shape. Then something dawns on him. It doesn't take long. "You know Jenn."

Serafíne

"I know Elijah more than I know Jenn," the creature shrugs. Wasn't joking about Castlewood and isn't reading his mind so she doesn't know where he goes with his assumptions and might not care, and it's not so much that she craves nature specifically as that she craves: strain, movement, striving, and everything that knits itself together into all of that.

Doesn't look like the sort who would go climbing, though. Not standing there in her expensive lingerie and silk robe and Prada sunglasses, still indulging her hangover with whatever the fuck she can find in the suite.

"He was telling me about you and Jenn and the dude she drew and shit. Said he was trying to get her to go into hiding while you got a handle on the Fallen, but that she wasn't having it.

"I don't blame her. That would fucking suck."

Gee, Sera should know.

"That why you're here? The Fallen?"

Michael

Earnestness even though he doesn't open his mouth to concede that Sera has the right idea in this. Even though when he does open his mouth he doesn't swear. Doesn't qualify things as sucking or not sucking. He would have said that Jenn deserved to retain her autonomy and make her own decisions. Informed consent. That's what they offered her.

The Euthanatos gives Sid a few sound thumps on the flank before he stands upright again. He tucks his hands into the pockets of his slacks and gives a quick glance to see if the dog's leash is lying around anywhere. It's the quickest of quick glances. Other than that Sera has his undivided attention.

"Yes," he says.

That's all he has to say about that. He's not averse to answering more questions and she doesn't get the impression that he doesn't want to discuss the Nephandus.

Serafíne

Her attention is on him, too. Perhaps it is not so undivided, though it is difficulty to tell given the round, reflective surface her sunglasses present to the world. Lenses large enough to obscure the whole of her eyes and mosts of her straight brows. Delicacy framing them, of course, which is hard to reconcile with her rather filthy mouth. Maybe the friendship between the Chorister and the Ecstatic is as difficult to reconcile as well.

From a distance.

Still, he says Yes and he sees that she's looking at him for more than a second or two. There is hang-time in that look, an awareness that is sharper than most who do not know her would give her credit for.

"You got a bead on 'em?"

Steady, steady, steady. Maybe she's banished her hangover already.

Maybe she uses the sickness the same way she uses the pleasure: to Work, and Work Through. Any port in a storm.

Michael

"I believe so."

Those of his Essence don't incline towards stillness. He is not quite so tall as their mutual friend the Chorister but he has a trim build that speaks of perpetual motion and that motion reasserts itself now that they're discussing the Fallen and it's occurred to his bones that he's been standing in the same spot for longer than a few seconds.

To the single-serve coffeemaker he goes.

"This is the closest I've come to zir in several lifetimes." He uses a genderfluid pronoun to refer to the Nephandus. Make of that what you will. "For obvious reasons I'd prefer to not outright scry on zir, but if it comes to that, I'm prepared to."

Serafíne

"Several lifetimes?" The lilt of inquiry in her voice even as the immediate beat of her attention drops away. Sera has opinions about reincarnation. Not possibility of it (everything is possible, everything is permitted), but about the bullshit insanity of it. Look at the shit some goddamned ancient asshole tried to do with a perfectly lovely new girl in a perfectly lovely new body not that long ago right here in Denver.

She settles her lovely ass on the back of the couch. Feet on the cushions, tea in hand. Tastes better when someone else makes it.

"You spend all of those lives hunting it?"

Michael

"I'm not sure, to tell you the truth."

The Chorister had done the both of them the favor of keeping what he knew about their lives and their individual quests to himself. He has said nothing of Sera's failed Seeking to Michael and mentioned very little of Mike's pursuit of an unaging Nephandus to Serafíne.

Must have figured it would give them something to talk about. If Sera had to stop and talk to him on her way out the door that would keep her out of trouble. Francisco Echeverría can be a conniving bastard when he really wants to be.

His coffee finishes spitting into the mug and he puts the hand not responsible for holding its handle back in its pocket. Turns towards Sera and leaves the mug sitting on the cupboard until it's cool enough to sip.

"Something tells me it's been the other way around. I have strong memories that come to me in dreams sometimes, but I have no way of accessing them while I'm awake, if you catch my drift."

Serafíne

"How long have you had those dreams?"

Quiet. Still-voiced but look, yeah. She lifts her chin and looks back at him, dark glasses gleaming, mouth mostly still. Something both quick and tender about the way she holds herself, as if she were readying to alight or aloft. Rubs the old bronze ring on her right index finger with her right thumb. Always does when she's anxious, thoughtful, pensive.

Michael

If it makes him uncomfortable to talk about himself and the past that has led him to this moment it is visible only in the way the light hits his eyes. She knows what it is to have caught a Fallen's eye. To be at the locus of a twisted mind's attention. He does not know this about her.

Elijah did say the Euthanatos is an honest man though. Ask and ye shall receive.

"Oh... since I Awakened. I'd imagine it was a package deal." A quick lopsided smile. An attempt at lightening the mood. "These particular dreams, though, the ones that led me to believe ze and I have met before, began a little over two years ago. After my last Seeking. I've been investigating zir since then."

Serafíne

"One of them wanted me when I was a baby-mage." Now he knows that about her. No one else in the city does, though. There is a bitter-sweet simmer of a half-smile friable across her mouth. She does not respond to his attempt to lighten the mood. Doesn't believe in that shit, which always feels to inauthentic, so lightly inhabited. Lightening the mood. "Didn't show up in my dreams so much as in person.

"There was another one, here in Denver? Wanted someone else more than he wanted me but took the time to let me know that he thought I'd be awesome at being one of them. Pan killed him.

"Still, made me start thinking there was something in me, you know? Intrinsic, that pulled them in.

"That made 'em look, and say, hey. There's a girl that could really start believing in oblivion."

Is he looking closely at her? Or away? Has to really be watching her to see the gleam of the track of a tear, or maybe two, sliding down her right cheek. "You wanna tell me about the dreams, I'll listen. I'm a Seer, and an Oracle. You know? Might be able to help you get to the bottom of it, find the tap root instead of chasing the seeds when they're cast to the wind."

Michael

He is looking closely at her. That tear and its companion don't go unnoticed. Unmentioned maybe but not unnoticed.

"I think that might be helpful," he says. "Thank you for offering."

Those tears tell him something Sera doesn't. Mike keeps it to himself for now.

"For what it's worth--" Having known her a grand total of an hour and all. "--I don't think there's anything in you that calls to them. Not any more than there is in the rest of us."

Oh. There's the leash.

Serafíne

"I know there's not," so she says, so she does not necessarily always believe, but hey. The surety of her bravado is front and foremost in her voice. The curve of her mouth beneath the reflective curve of her glasses. Something about the lilt of her chin, or the way her lean frame and long legs slide down from the spine of the couch. Bare feet on the plush carpet, quiet.

"Except for the fact that I'm hot as fuck and throw the best parties, there's not a goddamned thing. Everybody likes to have a goodtime, you know?

"Even when you're getting ready for the end of the fucking world."

--

He's found the leash. He can walk the dog. She is padding back into Her Half of the suite, fully intending to spend the next several hours soaking in the oversized tub and - then - what? God only fucking knows.

"You let me know when you're ready," is the last thing she says before she disappears back into her room.