Javier
It's late Sunday afternoon in downtown Denver. The ambient temperature is hovering at 32, which is just cold enough to keep the soft layer of new-fallen snow from melting. Pedestrian traffic in Civic Center Park is a bit sparse, and the lonely violinist standing on the steps near the Southern entrance is already beginning to rethink his choice of venue. Maybe later he'll go back to 16th Street Mall. The tips were good there.
The clouds have cleared and the sun is bright against the snow. Javier finishes tuning the strings on his instrument and tosses a glance in the direction of the orange feline who's currently investigating some unknown (but apparently fascinating) scent near one of the garbage cans. "What do you think, Finn? Paganini? Mendelssohn?" The cat looks up and fixes him with a silent expression. Javier grins. "Paganini it is."
Adjusting the violin beneath his chin, he sets the bow to the strings and begins to play. The piece is Caprice 24. He's practiced it enough now his fingers know the notes by instinct and muscle memory. The music rings out across the open park, echoing against the stone pillars and threading through the air to draw the attention of any who happen to walk past. At first bright and quick, fluid and complex - shifting into longer, deeper notes before jumping high and fast again. The bow has to dance to get this piece right. There's no room for hesitation. No room for thinking. And that's what the music sounds like: dancing. It's wild, ardent, flourishing.
Javier's breath plumes out into the air in little clouds of steam. As he plays, the numbness in his fingers begins to recede, warming with the rapid motions. He's dressed the way one might expect a street musician to be dressed: faded jeans, scuffed boots, fingerless gloves. His coat is an old beige wool trenchcoat that he picked up from Goodwill out in Oregon. There's a scarf and a hat sitting on the step beside him. He always takes them off when he plays. The violin case rests open, ready and waiting for tips (though he doesn't expect much today.) He's standing atop the step so the music will carry further and gradually a small audience begins to collect. One person. Two. Three. It isn't much but he'd keep playing even if it was just him and the cat.
The wind plays with his hair. It's a bit wild too: thick and dark and curled and struck through with little hints of silver. He closes his eyes while he plays, his expression shifting to one of deep focus and churning emotion. Like the music is playing him as much as he's playing it - which, if you asked him, is what he'd say.
----------------------
Javier
[Nightmares]
Dice: 5 d10 TN7 (4, 6, 7, 7, 10) ( success x 3 )
Javier
[Dex and/or Cha (same score) + Art, diff 8 because Paganini is crazy-hard to play, -1 for ability aptitude]
Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (2, 2, 3, 4, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 4 ) [Doubling Tens] [WP]
ix
Witnessed!
Sera
Perception + Awareness
Roll: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 4, 4, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]
--
She shows up somewhere in the early-middle of the piece, the early rich, soulful ribbon of unfurling sound, one of the first sections where Caprice 24 opens up and unfolds and offers its listeners, its performers, the change to - perhaps - just breathe. Then these needle-bright glissades, so bright and assertive and spectacular they seem like ice, crystallizing then shattering, mid-air. On foot and alone and - yeah - curious and maybe (maybe) he can feel the shift, the change in the air when she arrives. Strangers do, now. Even the deepest sleepers, sometimes. The way she bends the curve of the world.
Apart from the little crowd he has gathered, she settles. Parks her ass on the sandstone railing, leaning her golden head back against one of the ionic columns, legs drawn up, her posture loose, her own eyes only half-closed because she is not listening to the music with the whole of her being, no. She is: watching him create it with the whole of his.
--
Scattered applause as the piece ends and the little knot made cohesive only by their sudden arrest-and-fixation on the stranger-and-his-music starts to break up again. She waits while they shuffle through; dig through purses or the front pockets of skinny jeans all stiff-armed and seeking trying to find some cash to toss into his violin case. Some change here and there, a few bills, yeah.
And her: twenty, twenty-five yards away, wind-whipped and bare legged despite the cold, despite the snow, dyed-blond hair a golden flag over the bulk of her black leather jacket, the solid contact of her boots with the sandstone railing, left leg drawn up, left arm looped around her knee, watching and waiting until the last couple has drifted away: an older woman with a cloud of gray curls and an older man in a fedora he has to keep reaching up to hold down against the wind. That's when she abandons her perch. Half-slides, half-jumps and circles to add her own tip to his open violin case: a couple of twenties folded up so they look like one bill of indeterminate though probably small denomination and a freshly-rolled, artfully twisted joint.
"That was pretty fucking amazing."
And, you know, she means it.
Javier
[Per+Awareness]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )
---
There's something a little romantic and a little bit sad about the way the violinist feels to Sera's senses. He doesn't have her striking beauty or her bold fashion, but there's a part of him that glows - luminous, especially when he plays. Like moonlight's seeping out of his skin. He resonates keenly with the music, and it's hard to tell at times whether he's playing it or it's playing him but maybe that doesn't matter. The point is, he feels the way emotions feel when they cut straight to your heart (poignant.) Which is also like feeling sad, but that's not always a bad thing.
People don't respond to him the way they do Sera, though. She walks into a space and the air changes. And Javier - he notices. Doesn't lift his eyes to look at her until he's finished the song, but even before then he is achingly aware of her, standing there against the rail listening to him play. When he opens his eyes, there are more people gathered than there were at the start. Some of them likely wandered in off the street when they heard him play. There are days when he pours his heart out and people simply drift past as though he were a fixture of the environment. Then there are days when an entire park stops still to listen. He's had both of those many times over now. For all the years he's been playing, there isn't much he hasn't experienced.
The scattered applause elicits a smile from him, though the lilt of the expression is a little tight (a little vulnerable, maybe.) He's always been better at playing than he was at charming crowds. Still he thanks the small audience, and when he smiles the second time it feels more assured.
By now the cat has wandered back to the steps and jumped up beside Javier to crouch with its body tucked low and its tail curled around its paws. Its golden eyes give a lazy blink in the sunlight. It doesn't feel the way Henry's fox does. It doesn't speak, or otherwise do anything especially wondrous. It's just a cat. (A cat that evidently appreciates violin music.)
Javier hops off the step, and when Sera approaches to add her tip to the case, he watches her with dark eyes and fixed focus. The joint gets a brief, bright grin. In truth, sometimes pot makes him paranoid. But sometimes it doesn't, and those are good days. Maybe this one'll be lucky.
That was pretty fucking amazing.
"Thank you." He nods toward the case to indicate he means the tip as well as the compliment. When a breeze gusts past, he's quick to transfer the contents into his pocket before a stray bill manages to float away. When he looks up, his eyes make this quick, instinctive scan of the landscape, darting from one end of the park to the other. They return to Sera's face quickly. She's a difficult creature not to look at. Then he just laughs a little and says, "Wow, you feel intense. When you came over I think I almost missed a note."
Sera
It's cold as fuck and she's hardly dressed for it and it doesn't feel like she's Working, precisely, to keep the cold at bay, though up-close the world seems to be both brighter and warmer in her presence. Leather jacket (black, battered) left unzipped over a hoodie (black, washed-and-worn), over an old Siouxsie Sioux tee cropped to reveal at least the lower-third of her expensive lace bra, these little denim cut-offs held up by a solid black leather belt full of grommets and studs. Fishnets, naturally. Solid boots that seem near-flat but still give her a solid inch-or-two which makes them almost of a height. Her only concession to the cold in that little exchange is the way she holds her hands in the pockets: this solid, forward motion that seems matched with the way she turns into the wind, when she does so. Hunched a bit: like resistance.
"I am intense, but I don't believe that." Quick smile, full of that bladed charm, "I think you'd only skip a note if it needed skipped. If the moment required its absence." but yeah - she seems pleased when he tells her she feels intense. Not smugly pleased or sharply pleased but quite simply: pleased.
And she's standing there feeling the curve of the earth and the cut of the wind and that poignant, luminous resonance that makes her throat close and her spine ache with wanting, see, those-who-are-gone.
And just like that, there are tears in her eyes.
And just like that, she reaches up and nudges the her sunglasses down to cover them up. The wind, you know? It stings.
"I'm Serafíne. You can call me Sera." The sun gilds her glasses, just so. Late in the day as it is, she is only recently awake. A little bit hung over, a little bit something else. Hair still a little bit damp from a shower.
"Play me something else, yeah? If your fingers aren't too cold."
Javier
Javier
[Retroactive roll for composing: Int and/or Manip (same score) + Art, -1 diff (ability aptitude)]
Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 2, 3, 5, 5, 7, 7) ( success x 5 ) [WP]
Javier
[Dex/Cha + Art, we'll say base diff... 7 -1 for aptitude again]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 4, 6, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1
Javier
[That should have been doubled - I'm an idiot. So 5.]
the devil
Witnessed!
---
Sera thinks he's lying. Javier's laugh is both pleased and self-deprecating. "Believe me, I have my off days. But it's flattering you think so."
Just like that, there are tears in Sera's eyes. She covers them with her sunglasses. It could just as easily be the wind, and if Javier suspects otherwise he doesn't indicate it. He does watch her for a moment though. It isn't always easy to keep his focus level when he isn't playing. His eyes want to move: to check the shadows and the trees and the pillars and the windows of the passing cars, to check the faces of the people who pass by. It isn't always easy, but he does it now without even thinking. Tunes out their surroundings (tunes out the cold, even) so that he can watch her. Wonder about her. She's younger than he is but, in many ways, stronger. And she's dressed like she wants to tell winter to go fuck itself.
You can call me Sera.
"Sera," he repeats. He doesn't offer her a hand because his hands are full, but he smiles in this way that feels a little soft and intimate. "I'm Javier. And I think... I can conjure something up."
Truth is, his fingers are cold. But they've been cold every winter for going on twelve years now. If he let inclement weather stop him from playing he'd never eat. So he props the violin under his chin and hovers the bow over the strings again. It takes him a moment to decide on what to play. In the intervening time the noises of nearby traffic can be heard over the wind.
Then he moves his hand, and there is music again.
The song he chooses isn't something that Sera will find familiar. It isn't quite so technically daring as Paganini, but it's lovely in its own right. The tone of the piece is melancholy and nostalgic, reaching these lonely high notes that manage to border the place between joy and sadness (bittersweet) before falling to a low, aching keen of regret. There's longing there. Music like an echo of memory. And just like before, Javier's body is absolutely overtaken by it.
By the time he's done, there are tears in his own eyes. Soft and glistening when he blinks them open. He brushes the back of his gloved hand over his wind-reddened cheek.
"I haven't quite finished that one yet."
Sera
They say the violin is the instrument closest in tone to that of the human voice. In the brisk air of that late Sunday afternoon, Javier's notes - well, they carry. Sera stands a bit apart from him, her golden head and gleaming glasses turned to the spare line of the sun where it is beginning to set against the horizon, and the audience returns. Here and there: in ones and twos and threes, they filter back. And no one quite knows what to make of it: music like that in the park late on a winter afternoon. Girl like that standing there like a rock star hidden behind her sunglasses: head cocked. Listening.
A few more coins, and a few more dollars are tossed into that open case.
There is applause - scattered, if only because it is hard to understand how to react to a work of such emotional power, or perhaps so naked a display of vulnerability in a performer - and then the strangers turn away to go about their lives.
Sera, though, turns on heel and then rocks up to her tip-toes and reaches for him and brings him close, if he allows it. The warm pressure of her mouth on his cheek, present enough that she tasts the salt from his tears. She smells a little bit like sleep and a little bit like tea and a little bit like cloves and a little bit like whiskey and the tip of her nose is red and maybe running, just a bit, from the cold. Cups her hand in his hair, around the back of his skull, and murmurs against his skin, "That was lovely. Thank you." Something about the moment feels like: communion, benediction. Something reverent, quiet, holy.
Then, just as easily, she lets him go.
"Wanna go get something to eat?" Quick little grin. "Someplace where you can warm up those fingers?"
Javier
There's a point during the song when the cat, orange fur ruffling in the wind, sits up and turns his head toward Javier. The sight of it cuts an endearing picture - like something out of a film or a storybook where music has the power to entrance the animal kingdom. Truth is, there are days when Finn would rather wander off to hunt mice and stare at songbirds. Cats can be capricious creatures. Today though: he listens. And when it's over he jumps down from his perch and twines himself around Javier's leg, his small body shivering lightly from the cold.
He and Sera have similar inclinations. Javier, who isn't really used to physical contact that isn't of the feline variety, goes a bit still when Sera touches him. His eyes fall shut when her lips (cold skin and warm breath) meet his cheek. She smells like an artist. He smells like old wool and winter, with traces of cigarette smoke and pine resin and a lingering note of coffee on his breath. His hair is thick beneath her hand. The moment feels touched by quiet reverence and Javier gives into that - receptive in the wake of his vulnerability. He doesn't try to touch her back, but when she pulls away his eyelids lift so he can regard her, long lashes giving a little butterfly sweep.
Beneath them, the cat meows quietly.
Wanna go get something to eat?
Now he smiles. "I wouldn't turn it down," he says, because he seldom turns down food (can't really afford to.) Though there have definitely been offers that he's accepted with more reticence. He pockets the last of the tips and sets his violin back into its case. The instrument is old: its varnish scratched and faded. Judging by the sound, the quality of its craftsmanship could best be described as passable. It will never be played in a concern hall, but it serves its purpose well enough. Most of his impromptu audience members don't have an ear for the difference anyway.
After snapping the case closed, Javier bends down to pick up the cat (who seems to tolerate the contact with a patience born of repeat handling.) "This is Finn, by the way. Say hello Finn."
Finn looks at Sera. In the sunlight, his eyes gleam bright tiger-gold. He gives a little swish of his tail. Javier opens his coat long enough to tuck the cat inside of it, sheltering him beneath his arm. He gets his scarf and hat, shaking loose any clinging snow, and puts them back on, winding the former around his neck loosely. Finally he re-fixes the buttons on his coat and grabs the violin case.
"Where to?"
Sera
"Hullo Finn," somehow talking cats (it isn't talking Sera but whatever: Javier is talking for it) seem to require a Hullo rather than a Hello. There is a distinctive hollowing of the vowel there, a certain attention she gives to the animal, as if she were expecting it to answer back or something. As if she were waiting for it to answer, but no, the cat gleams all golden-eyed at her and allows himself to be picked up and hauled about and tucked away all with a steady and signaturely feline dignity that says: no, nothing untoward is happening to me, and Sera watches and watches and waits while Javier puts away: violin and rosin and bow and button up his coat and rewind the scarf around his neck and standing still in this cold has the cold starting to get to her, but Sera, she sets her teeth against the possibility of chattering. This firm clench of her molars, this entrenched, defiant resistance. "I've never seen a cat allow himself to be manhandled like that. He must fucking adore you."
And then he's ready and in the time he has been stowing away his instrument she has been considering and discarding options, one after another. So many places are closed, or closed early, or closing soon, on Sunday evenings.
Still:
"Let's go to Public House." He's packed up now, holding his violin case in one hand, bundled against the cold. She: seems inclined to insinuate herself into his space again, and goes to link her arm through his free one. And yes, she likes being close. But on some level, she is also using his body as a windbreak, or a bulwark against the cold. "It's like six or eight blocks from here? Kinda south. I'm not sure where you parked, but it's not too far."
Javier
He must fucking adore you.
Javier laughs at that. Under his coat Finn squirms a little, adjusting his position to get comfortable beneath the layers. "We have a lot in common, me and Finn. He claimed me back when he was a kitten. I think at some point he figured out being manhandled was better than being cold and hungry." Desperation will make animals (and people) do strange things. There's a certain fierceness to their bond, the violinist and his cat, that speaks of loneliness. "He doesn't seem to mind it as much in the winter," Javier adds, his expression softly wry. There's still a bit of moisture clinging to his eyelashes. It's starting to freeze in the cold air and he has to blink the loosen them.
Sera suggests Public House. In truth, she probably could have suggested anything within easy travel distance and Javier would have followed along gamely. It isn't a name or a place he's familiar with, but then he isn't familiar with much of Denver (yet.) There's likely something a bit telling about the fact he brings the cat with them; that he even carries Finn around like this at all. Something telling, too, about the way he looks at Sera when she loops her arm through his and leans in close to his body heat. Not like it bothers him (it doesn't - not now, not when he can see her coming and he knows it's her and not some unnamed threat) but like he doesn't quite know what to make of it: the ease with which she touches him, and the prickle of sharp awareness that comes with being this close to another human body. He seems to pick up on the fact she's cold though (she must be, with what she's wearing,) and as they start to walk he turns himself into the wind to block the worst of it from striking her.
"I don't think I've met anyone like you," he says quietly. And he doesn't really mean the way she dresses or the way she speaks, though she might take it that way. "Como si fueras encendida por dentro."
Sera
Sometimes walking in such cold with such wind takes all one's energy. Winter is like that, isn't it? Hungry fucking bastard. Sera walks arm-in-arm as if it were natural and this close he can certainty sense the forced, deliberate tension in her spare body, the way she stiffens all the long muscles in her body in her campaign to resist and refuse the cold. They walk; he turns himself into a windbreak and she tucks both hands into the pockets of her coat and ducks her head when a turn takes them head-on into the wind. Once, a certain blast of high-plains wind has her unearthing her hands and zipping up the hoodie and she manages that, somehow, without really letting go of his arm.
It is a brisk walk through the gathering dark. There aren't many people outside at this hour, in this weather. The odd jogger heavily kitted out against the weather, headphones insulting them entirely from the world. The odd dog walker. A few others hunkered against the cold, heading out for a few last errands before evening darkens to night.
The scent of woodsmoke in the air. Maybe a half-block ahead: Public House, so announces a low-key sign on a squat, red-brick building that has been transformed with wide glass windows all around the lower level. There's a modest exterior patio with extra seating warmed by an inviting looking fireplace, but the night is both too cold and too slow for anyone except the a smoker to seek refuge out there. Right now, no smokers in sight. Just that slightly disorienting view of the people inside, leaning over tables, engaged in - well, something. Conversation, debate, argument, engrossed in a book, a laptop, the screen of a cellphone, anything. All those strangers, all their lives, separated from the observer.
Sera gives Javier a little nudge, a little tip of her golden head to say: hey! that's where we're going! and starts to angle them in that direction. She is moving perhaps a little bit faster (the promise of both warmth and cocktails immanent from the cafe/bar) when he tells that he's never met anyone like her. That first sentence she does not take any particular way, though something about it arrests her. Really does arrest her: the creature stops and gives this sharp and borderline animal cant of her head, her glasses fixed on his profile. The sun's more or less gone now, why the fuck does she persist in wearing them? But wear them she does, and her mouth tucks itself into a strange little twist beneath them.
Then he goes on, and Sera, she shakes her head. This neat little negation.
"Yo no te creo . Todo el mundo está quemando por dentro."
Something about the way she says that - reverent, almost prayerful, burning - tells him that she believes it, too.
Javier
They head toward the bar. As the wall of windows draws near, Sera's pace increases. She's only a couple of inches shorter than Javier - give or take the extra height from her shoes - and he has to give a little jog to keep hold of her, laughing quietly at the awkwardness of it. The jostling motion of his steps briefly annoys the cat curled snugly against his side, resulting in a sleepy meow and a shifting of fabric as Finn puts his paw on Javier's chest and pokes his head out the collar. A moment later he blinks, tucks his ears back and huddles down inside again - clearly not much in the mood for the cold.
They stop there, outside Public House. Nearby the warmth and light from the bar seeps out onto the sidewalk as though to beckon them inside. Javier seems quietly pleased she understood his Spanish, and when she offers that counterpoint a wistful smile spreads slowly across his face. Like he's thinking of things that are both here and not-here.
"Perhaps you are right."
Somewhere nearby, a car engine gives a loud pop. Javier startles in this subtly animal way, eyebrows lifting as his gaze darts toward the noise. Once he identifies the sound he exhales through his mouth, focusing on the rabbit-pulse beat of his heart.
"Let's get inside. Me estoy congelando mis cojones apagado."
Observe: the classy violinist. He shuffles up to the door and holds it open with his shoulder.
Sera
Javier tells her that perhaps she is right and Sera has a smile on her face that is equal parts smug and beatific: yes, she is right, of course she is. And it all could be rather infuriating if there weren't something so immediate and maybe reverent and somehow, strangely absent about that smugness, but there's no time to analyze it because: anyway. Somehow a car backfires. You know: from her, a certain sort of seizure that occurs and immediately passes, autonomic reaction to a startling sound, nothing more. They're close enough that she is absolutely aware of his reaction, though. The liminal tension. Her sunglasses on his profile, and behind them her dark eyes, and within this attentiveness that is physical, immediate, present. Neat little pressure of a frown-that-isn't-anything but the impression of a passing consideration, perhaps even concern, between her brows.
So: aware. Here-is-a-bruise aware, and here is a creature who does not rush to fill that space with questions or assumptions and when he tells her that they need to go inside or his balls are gonna freeze off, well,
"Functionally I think that seems pretty fucking unlikely,"
she gives him a small smirk, "but wouldn't wanna risk it, hmmm?" that is framed by something else, less definable, accepts as he opens the door, and heads inside.
They unlink arms, then. Hard and awkward to handle doors and instrument cases and menus and the like and she knows the place, heads right for the menus in a rack on the wall, picks up two and hands him one. It's not the usual arrangement for a bar-cafe: there's a clerk (side-cut dyed a somewhat muddy trio of pink-green-blue) at the register ready to take their order - drinks and food - who'll then hand them a wand to post on their table for the servers to bring when food/drinks are ready. Neat buzz in the air, though, an open kitchen that hums with energy even at this hour, which is really pretty slow. A huge central hearth with another wood-burning fireplace and the tables and booths radial out from there. This cat-walk of a 'second floor overlooking the main floor.
Sunday is all-day-brunch and Sera orders the cowboy breakfast plus a side of rosemary roasted potatoes and one, no wait two Bloody Mary's and one wonders where the whip-lean creature intends to store all of that food and she waits while Javier orders and then adds on an extra serving of housemade sausage (she is thinking of Finn-the-cat) and hands over an AmEx that she digs outta an inner pocket of her leather jacket. They get a couple of little wands (one for drinks, one for food) and Sera allows Javier to pick where they sit. She noticed his reaction to the noise. Wherever he chooses, she slides in across from him. Still that humming sense of not precisely inebriation, not quite yet, but alteration. Of refusal of the rules of ordinary behavior. She leans forward, tattooed forearms braced on the table, like they're old, old friends breaking bread together for the first time in an age. They talk. The night moves. The world turns.
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