Previously:
Pan drove Sera fifteen hours from Los Angeles to Denver. Fifteen hours not including all the times they stopped. Fifteen hours where they had all the time in the world to talk and argue. Some semblance of argument. Pan proving what an overprotective father type he can be when he gets it into his head to be.
Just before the Colorado state line they came to a draw: he was not going to take her to Hawksley's mansion. He was not going to dump her on Kalen and Grace's front lawn. He was not going to have the Euthanatos handcuff her to the radiator until she felt better.
They reached the Denver city limits and a sense of sobriety came over the priest. Part of him wanted to set aside his life back in Los Angeles just to stay a while and help. The better part of him knew that they did not need him. Not like his congregation needed him.
So Pan made a phone call to his associate and his associate gave him an address and Pan drove to that address. He parked the car in the garage and put his arm around Sera's shoulders as he walked her towards the stairs.
--
They wait in the lobby of the Hotel Monaco for no longer than five minutes before the elevator dings with a car arriving. They open to reveal a tall man with fair skin and dark hair. He wore the remnants of a three-piece suit trousers and belt and dress shirt. He is handsome and Sera can tell before he opens his mouth that he is a friendly sort.
His resonance feels like unraveling. Like steadiness. Like a storm. No Jhor stains either his resonance or his soul. A rarity in his tradition.
They greet each other as "Father Echeverría" and "Mike." Pan introduces her as "My friend, Serafíne" and him as "My stock broker, Michael." 'Stock broker' appears to be a joke. 'My friend' does not.
SerafíneNobody is looking at her. Strangers should be staring, you know? The heady gut-punch of her resonance, the way she looks, the way she dresses, the way she exists in the world: she was made to see and be seen, if anyone ever was.
Pan draws looks, sure. Strangers, businessmen, engineers, doctors in town for the upper GI conference, CEOs in for a meeting of shareholders, oil company execs hoping to do something, anything, to stem some of the losses. Wait: they're not actually losing money now. Making a bit less, sure. So: Pan draws glances, some people want to bask in that light, others want to shield their eyes, others want to hide, but no one looks at him the way they'd look at her.
If they could see her.
Which they can't.
--
Our Sera settled into circle of Pan's arm as if it were natural that they walk together like that. More than natural: she needed the contact after the brief stop at 719 Corona Street. God that made her sad. In the bedroom upstairs Dan packed what he thought she'd want into a twee little vintage hard-sided suitcase right down to the stuffed rabbit left to nap forlorn in the middle of her empty bed all the time she was gone and talked to her like she was there and she was, and she could hear everything he said to her and it made her want to cry when she saw his uncertainty, the concern she could do nothing to dispel.
So she cried some more than they had to sit in the parking garage for a little while before she was feeling up to getting out of Pan's car. Doesn't want him to go.
Knows he has to.
--
"Hey." IT IS NOT HER FRIENDLIEST GREETING. Sera gives Michael a banked look and a twist of a sort-of-smile that ends with twist of her closed mouth. "This is Sid."
Maybe he didn't notice the dog until she introduced it, but there it is, tail thumping a subdued but suitably eager greeting.
"You can call me Sera. Everyone does." A neat little look sideways, no point rehashing those arguments, traces of her tears still evident on her face.
MichaelPan hugged Dan on the way out of 719 Corona Street. Didn't force it on him but he has a sense about moments that call and do not call for two people to embrace and informing a man that his best friend had come back from a failed Seeking incapable of making herself known to Sleepers and needed her things so an associate of his could keep an eye on her for an indeterminate amount of time seemed to him that exact sort of situation.
He would have stayed if he thought it was in her best interests. He does not.
So he leaves her with Mike. Sera is not at her most friendliest but he expects nothing out of her. A brief flinch of surprise but that surprise sublimates into being charmed. He gives the dog consensual scratches behind his ears and under his chin and rubs his belly if the invitation is extended.
"Sera," Mike says. Bright in tone but not obnoxious. He can sense the intensity of the impending departure and the weight of the circumstances that have brought Sera here. "I think I will. Father, thank you, again."
This, about something else. The two men clasp hands and shake before embracing again. Pan turns to Sera and gives her the tightest hug he has ever given her. One as if in expectation of this being the last time. A hand at the back of her head and a kiss to her forehead.
He has always loved her like a daughter.
And the priest is gone not long after that. Mike waiting with his eyes aimed down as if to afford them their privacy. After a time he picks up Sera's suitcase.
Life goes on around them.
SerafíneGod, she hugs him back. Doesn't want to let him go once he pulls her in like that so she balls up her fists like she could go a round or two boxing with the universe, first knock out wins. We see how that goes. And she can't stop time but she can: dilate it, right? unloop and unwhorl it, spool out seconds into seconds into memories of seconds and she could right now, but she doesn't, thinks of it, doesn't. Maybe it happens like that in memory.
Somehow Sera manages not to cry until Pan cups her skull and kisses her on her brow.
Over her third eye.
--
Even then it's something she's holding on to, holding back from, shuddering with rather than letting-go-of. Sid whines a bit, gives these experimental thumps of her tail, wants the Person to not-cry and bumps her big head against Sera's right thigh to tell her so.
Michael picks up her suitcase and Sera was going to. But he's done it so, she breathes in, still those sort-of-crying breathes, shaking inhales and shuddering exhales and it is difficult to see someone like that, right? red-eyed with grief, emotion, the raw, unvarnished darkness of it laid flat out before you, but the stranger gives her some privacy and Sera in her way is grateful.
Doesn't say anything. How do you make small talk after that?
She follows him back into the elevator, and Sid comes with, toenails clicking on the floor.
Somewhere between the 14th and the 22nd floor, though, "You take in alot of strays?"
People, she means. Not dogs.
MichaelIn the presence of a weaker member of another tradition that may have been the case. She may have met with a person who could not weather the rawness of her capacity for Passion. He could weather it. If she had come at him as a stranger and laid her grief upon him Michael would not have shied away from it.
Still: he grants them their moment. He is still there when they are finished embracing. He holds to the silence when Sera does not speak.
If the dog is amenable Mike scratches Sid beneath his jowls as the elevator ascends.
You take in a lot of strays?
That strikes him as humorous. Not riotously so. But he huffs out an amused breath with the inquiry and then stops to consider the question.
"I was one, once," he says. "Now that you mention it..."
Serafíne"Fuck." Under-her-breath, raw-and-quiet. If there is humor here, it is of the gallows sort and Sera is in a needling mood. Needs it as an antidote, perhaps, to all that rawness. Doesn't mind vulnerability of all sorts, but is also remarkably private. "Most of us were. Not that many to-the-manor-born."
--
Dark eyes lift; she's not looking at him, precisely, so much as the gleaming confines of the elevator, their reflections in the muted polish of the wood-and-chrome. Trying to imagine herself erased from the scene and still present. Ugh, creepy.
"What did Pan tell you about me?"
Michael
"No. Absolutely. You're right."
He doesn't seem as if he's trying to appease her. As if he knows anything about her situation or her struggles or the path upon which she's embarked. For all she knows he doesn't.
For all she knows he is used to dealing with the spirits of those who have gone onto the other side. He is used to speaking to those who are trapped in a past life as if he never left. The Euthanatos are a strange breed.
He is looking up at the floor indicator before she asks what Pan told Mike about her. He glances over at her curious and contained at once and then he looks straight ahead at the closed doors.
When he speaks he does not have an accent. Maybe a bit of Chicago clinging to his intonation but what Sera may notice more than that is his sense of elocution and diction. If he has an accent he can work around it.
"That you were a friend. That you knew the city well." A beat. An omission. A prelude to a joke? It could go either way. This guy seems earnest. "He didn't tell me so much as he threatened me with bodily and spiritual harm should anything happen to you while you were in my care."
SerafíneSera is about to ask a Euthanatos Adept whether or not anyone has ever mistaken him for a Mormon. Something about the combination of straight-up earnestness with a suit. She's just gearing up for it because she Does Not Want To Be Here and doesn't really have anywhere else to go.
But then the stranger tells her that Pan didn't so much tell him as threaten him with bodily and spiritual harm and she breathes out a kind of hooked, hitched breath. Almost a laugh, but ugh, she wants to cry again.
"I've got a place. With my friends, bandmates. Sleepers can't see me right now, though, so Pan didn't want me to stay there while this - "
Shuddering breath.
"While this lasts." Trying not to entertain the possibility that it could be permanent. "He's probably right. I'm sorry if I'm being a fucking asshole. This just sucks."
Michael"Are you being a fucking asshole?"
This question posed in total honesty. He actually pulls his gaze away from the reflective doors to look over at Sera. Down at the dog. Encapsulate the both of them in his photographic memory in case it comes up again he can call back on an image of her being an asshole.
"I didn't think you were."
SerafíneThe creature gives a neat little shrug, refusing responsibility for any piece of it.
Changes the subject, even, as the elevator levels up with Michael's floor and the doors sigh open.
"You're alot less creepy than I thought you'd be. I really hope there's a mini bar in your room."
MichaelSo they settle it. He hadn't realized she was being an asshole. If she was she isn't going to own it. The elevator opens its maw and reveals a throwback of a corridor. Dark carpet and mustard-colored walls. No sign of the outside world aside from a window at either end allowing in the sunlight and he isn't as creepy as Sera thought he would be.
Even if she were to watch the weaving of his Work Sera would find no sign of Jhor. The Death Taint. That is rare among his tradition especially as powerful as he feels.
Her statement does not amuse him near as much as the initial statement had. He can appreciate why she asks it though. He is self-possessed but not unaware.
"There is," he says. "You're welcome to it."
Serafíne"See, I am being a fucking asshole."
This sad, wry curve to her mouth. She precedes Michael out of the elevator and swings away from him, wandering down the hallway with Sid pacing at her Sid. They move in such strange sync, the slight girl (who is, Michael can see as she walks ahead of him, sporting a thoroughly bedraggled plush panda backpack on her back, over her oversized leather coat, band t-shirt, denim cut-offs, fishnets and curb-stomping boots.
Has this gait like she's eight feet tall.
Even now.
Maybe, especially now.
--
He stops in front of the suite. She leans back against the door, watches him as he pulls out the keycard and reaches for the doorknob as the light turns green, pushes the door back, open, in. Has this scrubbed-raw feeling about her then that feels unflinchingly open, delicate, aggressive all-at-once.
"I'm sorry. I'm usually only an asshole to asshole. You're just caught in the crossfire. Probably a pretty stand-up guy for doing this."
This grimacing, brave little smile before she turns around, ducks and heads inside.
"I just really want my friends, you know?"
Doesn't say much more. Follows wherever he takes her suitcase. Unlatches it and starts unpacking, or "unpacking" then hides away in her room. Doesn't say much more. Isn't much for small talk, right now. Hates hates hates sleeping alone,
but she does, tonight. And probably for many nights hereafter.
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