Forward.

Serafíne
An old Jeep in the driveway with Colorado plates, parked next to but not inside the garage.  Mud kicked up by the tires is spattered over the flanks.  Hell, it's spring, or near to it.  Mudlucious, right?

That's the first signal that the chantry has a visitor other than its routine residents.

In the kitchen, someone's made tea.  It's cooling beneath a cozy.  The supple of alcohol has been replenished - two big bottles of Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey are set out on the counter.   These days the space is no longer precisely communal - instead, it belongs to someone so.  Harder to figure out where things go.

But Sera isn't in the kitchen or the living room or downstairs in the well-secured library, she is on the back patio, where steam from the hotspring rises in the cool (almost) spring air, densely mineral.  The Cultist has been here, soaking her calves in the warm pool of water, meditative or near to it, long enough that her Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt has gone translucent from the rising steam.  There's a cup of whiskey-spiked tea on the flagstone lip near her right thigh and no one within haling distance.  If Dan drove her (he always does), he is secreted away somewhere else in the Chantry.

Nicholas Hyde
From the driveway, there's a sound of another approaching car: these open spaces, without trees to muffle the sound, forecast approaching vehicles from farther away than the places where Nick has spent most of his recent time.  Sera can hear it come to a stop in the driveway, can hear the engine cut.  She cannot hear the footfalls of whoever emerges from the vehicle. (Ironic, perhaps, that such an Echo should leave no sound.)

Nicholas has not been here, other than the meeting in which they all gathered to talk about Alexander's abduction and likely subsequent torture and reconditioning.  He is unaware of who the chantry is owned by; it only occurs to him how very small the place is considering what he grew used to on the east coast.  The population is sparser here, and so too for their kind.

She can hear the door open and shut; still no footfalls.

It takes a while for Nick to make his way down the spring, if only because he is wandering through the dwelling to see what's there, upstairs and down and into the library and back out to where he can see steam rising past the foggy windows.  When he sees Sera there, it makes him halt, if only for a moment.  "Hello," he says, and he sounds a touch surprised.

A moment later he is sitting next to her near the pool of water, crosslegged.  "It's good to see you up and around."

Serafíne
Sera does not tend to meditate with her eyes closed.  No, she manages it with her eyes: open and she thinks that's as it should be.  Leaning back, palms on the damp stone, her arms straight, back arched,  dark eyes half-lashed, affixed to the sky above.  The scrim of pale, thready clouds in the saturated sky.  The changing light as evening is starting to fall, the trail of jet cutting purposefully through the gloaming.


He says hello and her sharp little chin drops and her dark eyes, too.  Otherwise, her posture does not change.  This spare twinge of an expression (shading wry, as response to his surprise, the source of which she does not know) on her mouth.  "Hello."

Right back at him, but not quite an echo.  He sounds surprised.  She sounds like she knows a secret, and hell - maybe she does.

And she watches him as he exits the house, circles around the patio, comes to sit near her, attention dropping only when he is seated at last.  Her profile to him, then, or an impression of it.  All planes and angles: honed rather than curved.

"I don't actually spend my whole life in a complete state of stupor."    Neat, incisive little shrug here.  "I was up all night, and coming down hard."   From magick, yes, and what she uses to fuel it.  "Quite a welcome wagon we hustled up for you and your wife, hmmm?"


Serafíne
"You never met Alexander, did you?"

Nicholas Hyde
"It was," Nick says, of the welcome wagon.  His fingers have found the knots at the neck of his boots, and he is working them through, trying to untangle them.  He has not answered her other question yet, about Alexander, and something in his expression suggests that he is processing her other words.

He does say: "I only assumed you were exhausted."  Nick's profile, his straight nose and bowed mouth and high cheekbones, are framed in the dimming light of the sun.  His hair has gotten longer since she saw him last; it is beginning to curl around his ears and at the base of his neck, as though he has chosen to eschew shears along with the trappings of the east coast.  (It never fit him anyway - that's not where he's from.)

Finally he has worked the knots loose, and he pulls off his boots.  His socks follow, and are tucked into the boots, which he sets aside.  As he rolls up the cuffs of the grey chinos he is wearing (his legs are sparsely haired), there is something musing there in his expression.  "I never met Alexander," he says, "but Pen told me about him.  It sounded like she respects him."

As he scoots toward the spring on the heels of his feet and hands to drop his feet in, he finally looks over at her.  "It sounds as though everyone around here is taking what happened pretty hard."

Serafíne
Nick says that he only assumed she was exhausted and Sera gives him this queer little glance; over her shoulder.  "Yeah?"  The hint of her nose, the sharp wing of her cheekbone, a shadowed eye.  Curls gone kinkier from the damp and the heat, a little more flyaway.    Her mouth in a smirk that has some edge to it.  Somehow more and less at once than it would, in any other circumstances.  Okay: a sobriety to her that matches her meditative pose, and seems somehow - less precisely sober and more, somehow - sacred.

"I was still hallucinating.  Plus the acid hangover.   Makes you feel like you've been pried apart and put back together."

Kinda what it feels like to scry like that, for someone like her, too.

"I met Alex the day he woke up.  You know?  Shitty thing to happen to him.  Fucking assholes."

Nicholas Hyde
Nick has leaned back on the heels of his hands, his feet fully immersed in the spring, his head tilted slightly back; he is not looking at Sera just this moment.  He is breathing in steam, and letting it swell his chest and settle in his hair and in the hollow of him, drinking in the place almost.  His hair has not yet begun to kink in the heat and the damp, but it will.

"I've never used that for magick," he says, though this is less some sort of judgment and more an idle comment, perhaps an invitation to say more or less as she wishes.

Serafine, when she mentions Alex, draws the Chakravanti's gaze back to her at last.  He sways into a more upright position, his spine perfectly aligned with his base, his shoulders set: he does some sort of yoga or meditation himself.  "What do you think are the chances of us finding him, realistically?" he asks, and perhaps he wouldn't ask this if Sera didn't feel as powerful as she does to him.  He assumes experience, and he assumes wisdom.    "As he was?"

Serafíne
For the moment, she does not pick up the thread of his idle comment about the tools.  A glance sure, a certain attenuated attention: not high-strung but somehow both nuanced and livewire that slides across his features.  She is looking for judgment.  Perhaps expecting it - but -

"Realistically?"  Her eyes, dark and darker, affix on him.  This quick, sorrowful curve to her fine mouth.  An expressively dampness in her eyes.  "I don't believe in their fucking reality.  And we won't find him as he was, yeah?  Because he won't be Then, he'll be Now."  Conviction, bright, sharp, engaging, in every goddamned word.

"But we'll find him."  This more nuanced; another hint of that sobriety, that precision.  Less conviction, you know, but still a core of believe.  "And whoever he is now, we'll help him figure it out."

Nicholas Hyde
There is a breath that she can hear; this is not sharp, it's not any kind of gasp for air or fish out of water sucking gills sort of desperation.  Just this quiet drawing in and release, during which his chest swells again.

He looks at her once more and his eyes glint amber in the looming twilight.  "Good.  I expect he'll be different," Nick says, though there is perhaps something in him that was encouraged by what Sera has said.  The expressions his face carries are also nuanced things, full of secrets and whispered promises and always questions.

Of course Nick expects Alex will be different; the core of his Tradition surrounds death and rebirth.

"I appreciated Dan's contribution to the meeting, by the way.  I wish I had stuck around longer afterward to tell him so."

Serafíne
She makes a noise, Sera.  Kicks her bare calves out in the water.  Can't know that the way her power colors his impression of her.  Doesn't understand just how much the way she feels has changed to everyone around her.  Beneath and inside it all, she is now, and always has been: simply herself.  So goddamned strange to grow up.  Right?

And she moves her legs, watches the water sluice over them.  She may be a little bit something even now, but, oh.  Not much.  Mostly she's just a little bit Sera, now.

A little bit sorrowful.  A little bit introspective, and Nick appears encouraged by what she said, and she catches that.  Gives him a flickering, allusive glance.  Half-lashed but strange and steady beneath them, then looks back down at the water again.

"He's around here, somewhere."  Quick, sliding little smile.  "If you really wanna tell him.  Usually doubles as my fucking chaffeur since it hardly seems like a good idea for me to get behind the wheel most of the time.   It's not something he really needs to hear, though, you know?"

Nicholas Hyde
"I should," Nick says, of Dan.  And then, "Maybe I'll try to catch him on the way out."  Whatever glances Sera is throwing him, he has not reacted to them; perhaps he has not noticed them, or merely does not know how to interpret them, and that wouldn't be so unusual.  Most people are self-centered creatures, given to watching others mainly for the purpose of knowing how to react to them.  He adds, "Regardless of need, I think most people like to know when they're valued, even for something small."

This has no barbs; there's nothing in it to argue with Sera.  It is what it is, a simple statement of belief, perhaps a sort of affirmation.

Nick lifts one of his feet too, but only enough to let one of his toes crest through the top of the pool and into the air.  He watches the swirls and eddies in the pool, and he twists his head around to touch his chin to his breastbone, stretching out the muscles in his neck and upper back.

"Can I ask you something somewhat personal?  There's something I've been wondering about."

Serafíne
"Mmmph."   That indulgent, or perhaps simply self-indulgent noise, that sounds like assent.  If there were any doubts, she puts them to rest a moment later.  "Sure.  What is it?"

Nicholas Hyde
After she gives her assent, there is this space in which Nicholas allows silence.  This is less due to any hesitation or regret for initiating the conversation, though if she looks over at him during this time his eyes will be cast off somewhere into the sunset, or wandering somewhere just past what either of them can see.  It's not even a stare, just this sort of dreamy unfocused-ness, without any especial intent.

He gathers his thoughts, orders them to communicate them properly.  Nick is married to a Hermetic; perhaps he is particularly aware that words have weight and is not careless with his.

"I've been struggling to move forward," he says, and while this is a sort of admission it has the air of an admission only given for the purpose of context.  "I think I've noticed...a lot of unhappiness and isolation amongst the Willworkers I've known who seem to have reached a higher level of understanding.  The price of power, so to speak.  Did it ever seem that way to you, when you were where I am now?"

Serafíne
Here is Sera listening, her head tipped toward, her hair curtained around her face.  Blond yes, but the color's artificial and there is almost always a suggestion of dark roots, if only in the fringe once shaved close over her left ear, which she has allowed to grow out at least to pin-curl length.  Still, it catches the light, frames her with it.  Enhances the perhaps mythic sense of wildness she has about her now.

And with her head bent like that, her face is all in shadow.  The subtle flicker of her expression, the damned sense of determination as she concentrates, right, because thinking is hard, but once upon a time someone named Hawksley refused to accept her I don't knows and he is still: in her head, right?  So she thinks even when her native instinct is to elide.  Pushing through the feelings, picks them up and turns them over, trying to find the words.

"I was - " pause, her brow contracted, her hands curled over the lip of the stone.  Neat little fingers, that separate sense of resonance that resolves itself into the ring on her right index finger, and all those tattooes.  "I was where I think you are now, when I came to Denver.  And I didn't think about it then.  There were a couple of Disciples here then, and they were cool, they were there for me.  You know?  And everyone..

"But looking back - "    Her eyes close; she has a flash of Pan.  The old photograph of his son beneath a magnet affixed to his fridge.  Another flash, Jim.  Alone in a cheap, ragged motel room reaking of his resonance.  The sour smell of too many days and too many drugs hanging in the air, the overwhelming sense of his despair.  And she doesn't say any of that, but there's an an indrawn breath, ragged, right?  Something like a spasm in the way her hands grip the stones framing the edge of the hot spring.

Tension in her shoulders as she holds herself: still, still, still.  Breathes in, out, in again.  Nods once, entirely to herself.  The answer to some old, old question.  "Why do you ask?"

Nicholas Hyde
Nicholas is not tipped forward but rather has settled back.  There is something open in his posture (perhaps this is more deceptive than it would seem) and in the set of his shoulders, the way the light falls on him and highlights the smooth plane of his nose and throws a gleam into the dark tangled chaos of his hair, turns the light blue of his shirt into a ripple of light and shadow.

If he understands her struggle to answer this question he does not say so, though in the look he gives her through the dark bar of his eyelashes suggests perhaps a sort of solidarity.  Nick, too, feels far more often than he thinks.

"Looking back?" and this is another question, a prompt, another of his invitations to talk more or less.

Perhaps she'll return to it.  When she asks him why he asks, there is this tilt of his jaw as he contemplates his answer and again, his eyes go questing for something past the limits of their sight.  Then, "I wondered, if you saw that too, if it made you hesitate."

Serafíne
"There was a priest."

Hasn't looked up yet, Sera.  Her expression is private and curtained, banked even, and that's a strange thing for anyone who knows her, but who knows her, really: now, as she was then?  This is an hour when the light is changing constantly.  The sun has slipped below the edge of some horizon and everything down below (we are all down below) is shadow-drenched but for the breathless brilliance of the sky, edged all around.  And the sky: skims the surface of the pool in dark reflection.

"First time I met him I needled him about maybe making out with me in his confessional.  A week and a half later he stood between me and a Fallen Adept.  Refused to let them have the soul of a girl who'd cried out to me in a dream, whose soul I'd sworn I'd try to save.  Or at least: give her a chance to save it her own damned self, you know?  To have a choice.

"And he was always there, whenever I needed him.  And fuck if I know if he ever needed me.  Didn't seem like he needed anybody, really.  Though maybe that wasn't true."

"If I ever hesitated, though.  I don't think that's what held me back."  She looks up here, at last.  Gives Nick a look, right then, entirely, unhesitatingly direct.  "Why?  Is that something that concerns you?"

Nicholas Hyde
Nicholas had caught, earlier, when Sera had said: I was where you are now.  It is hard to say what he thinks of that; it would be hard even for Nick to say what he thinks of that, of the possibility of all that could be given a few years' time.  Sera thinks of a priest, and Nick thinks of Jonas, of Ciara, names that seem long ago and far away now, because they are.

There is this still air that precedes his question, as though he is weighing this again, as though there are words he could have instead inserted before and after.  But instead: "Did she save it herself?  The girl."

The world is shadow-drenched tonight, and it seems to have enlivened him in a way: his eyes are brighter in the half light, and his skin which is light brown at midday seems to drink in the moon now.

He does not flinch beneath the directness of her gaze.  Nick has drawn one of his feet out of the water, brought it up against the rim of the spring, where water sluices down and back into the pool.  To her question, he says, "It concerns me.  I asked you because you seem more settled than many of the ones I've met, though," a glance flicked sidelong to her, an acknowledgement, "granted, I don't know you very well."

Serafíne
"Yeah."  So says Sera, "she did."  Just like that too, a musing curl to her mouth, and she doesn't tell Nick that he may have met the girl, because she doesn't know whether or not he has, and anyway: somehow she has never believed that that part of the story is in any way her own to tell.

--

Still the direct look.  Sera has dark blue eyes that go simply dark in all these shadows.   Straight, expressive brows.  These sharp features that are not plainly pretty, precisely, but are still  - quick, sharp, arresting, and that's her physical presence before anyone tastes the first lick of her magick.  Her mouth is open: the huff of a laugh largely unvoiced.  More the cusp of a breath than anything.

"I never really knew that many powerful mages.  You know?  A handful of Disciples.  Two Adepts, one of them Fallen.  One that priest I mentioned: and when I met him he was a Disciple.  Sounds like you've known alot more.

"And - " she looks down here; half-smiles and this is private, yeah.  Strokes the bronze ring on her right index finger with her the meat of her right thumb - reflexively, thoughtlessly.  This minute tic of a movement.  "I think you're the first person to ever call me settled."

Nicholas Hyde
"Mm."  Nick does not know whether he has met this girl; perhaps it does not even occur to him that he would have.  The landscape of Denver is new and still unfamiliar, larger and smaller at once than the east coast.

Which he says.  "Pen and I met and used to live in coastal Connecticut, near Boston," he says.  His foot has found its way back into the water, and now he is looking into the pool with perhaps some longing, as though it's calling to him in a way that only he can hear: perhaps he'll climb into it, after Sera leaves.  "It's a very Hermetic area, but also just more populated by Awakened people in general,  I think.  At least in the urban areas.  There was a not insignificant number of Adepts there."

Almost an afterthought, then, "And a Master who I always felt would wrap me in a web and suck out my soul, given the chance."

His eyes turn to Sera then, to the ring she turns around on her finger.  "Maybe settled isn't the word.  You seem...more comfortable, maybe.  Less Other."

Serafíne
Poor Nicholas.  If Sera were longing to climb into those waters, she simply: would.  Regardless of her state of dress or undress, regardless of her goddamned audience or anyone else's sense of propriety.  Well, for the most part.

And he glances at her and she is not looking at him.  Listen, she is a spare thing, lovely and raw with this hint of the wild even when she is - as she is now - rather composed, really.  Still enough that one can see the delicacy of her features beneath the especial trappings of her sartorial style.  Ink on the cartilage of her elfin ear, skewered by a half-dozen piercings.  Ink below too, the shape and measure of which is mostly hidden by the fall of her massed (bleached) blond curls.

That ring she turns: thoughtlessly, meditatively, a habitual movement of which she is not wholly aware.  It is old, warm, beaten bronze with a flattened shield etched with symbols she does not know or understand.  And it has resonance of its own, see: the promise of unending flight, the flooding warmth of the sun.

"You don't have to follow the path that anyone else followed, yeah?  We all make our own.  And anyway, who says that forward is always the best way to go.  That's a fucking lie told by people who don't understand that time moves every which way."

Nicholas Hyde
Every which way, Sera says, and here Nick smiles: "Or back on itself."  We go forward and we end up somewhere where we've already been before.

Nicholas, see, for all his insight into others and elevation of emotion and joy in the human experience: he's still Chakravanti, and the world is cyclic, and his responsibility and duty lend him a sort of propriety that mean that there is little he does without intention.

Nicholas does observe the delicate line of her cheekbones and the dark roots of her hair, the ink just beneath her skin (perhaps he'd ask her about it, except there is little that annoys people with a lot of tattoos quite like intensely personal questions about what their tattoos mean.)  She is not looking at him and so he has looked away again, and his hands find each other and link together in his lap as the fading light of the sun sets fire to the plains.

"I understand that we all reach Ascension differently," he says, and this has a slight air of musing.  "I think the trick is in knowing how you want it to be different."  There is another look to her then, though this is sidelong and doesn't linger.  "Did you create your ring, out of curiosity?"

Serafíne
"I'm probably about to be heretical as fuck but I don't really like that word, you know?  Ascension.  I haven't always lived in Denver?  I flew to London the day I turned 18, and I was already awake when I got on that plane, even if I didn't fucking understand it, and I might've spent as much goddamned time as possible avoiding anyone in a position of authority or power because I kinda hate both: authority and power.  You know?  The mantling of it."

Except when she doesn't.

"All that hierarchy shit?  I think it's just as big a lie as the fucking rest of it.  Helluva lot easier to accept, though, when all these accidents of birth or time or power or devotion or history or what the fuck ever have put you at the top of the pile, right?  Which is some of the problem of your eat-your-soul Master, I'd wager."

Quick-flash of her neat little smile, which begins with a bright, defiant, toothsome edge that shades into something else: complex, aching, nostalgic for his question that follows, after.  "Naw.  I think it's Egyptian or some shit.  Hawksley gave it to me?"  Lilting pause.  Then: her voice banked, "Consecrated it when he left town."

Nicholas Hyde
For Nick's part, he has never heard it described in any other term other than perhaps Enlightenment.  It is not precisely that Sera's vehemence takes him aback: there are no signs that he is offended or set ill at ease by her heretical-as-fuck response.

No.  Nicholas looks over at her while she speaks, and his eyebrows creep up toward one of the dark spirals of hair that winds down in front of his forehead, and when he draws a breath it is this quick bracing thing, as though this is the first time he has ever heard anyone speak of accidents of birth or time or power or devotion or history in this context.  Because it is.

Because something within him settled into place.  Can she hear it?

Her other response names another person he does not know, offers this explanation about consecrating, and to this Nick nods: perhaps he will return to it later.  Conversations are rarely linear, with him; he has a good memory.

"So if the mantling of it is the problem, do you - you personally - go about dismantling?"

Serafíne
"Mostly I personally go about partying."

And yet - you see - her direct look, her dark eyes.  This kind of challenging flash behind him.  The thing inside her that is meant for opposition, for clash, for saying fuck you to every unthinking convention in the world.    And something else, too: quick and keen and expansive, a strange sort of simmering, 'plosive -

"Which isn't - "  God, sometimes she says shit and then she doesn't know what she wants to say again.  All those words inside her, chasing through.  "Fuck, I don't know that I go about doing anything."

Nicholas Hyde
Sera's response makes Nick smile.  Nick, who is part of perhaps one of the most driven Traditions of the Nine, to whom the concept of self-sacrifice is so intrinsic that he had to justify to himself the decision to marry, and who additionally married into the other Tradition known for its drive: maybe he finds her response refreshing, in a way.  Perhaps he can also appreciate its symmetry in how it also flaunts expectation.

"You went and found Alex," he points out.

He'd glanced away, after her direct look, and back into the pool of water; this is less to be avoidant than it is the process of him gathering his thoughts.  His gaze is intent, as though he could read something there beneath the surface.  "I'd imagine it gets kind of jarring, to reject hierarchy and also find yourself closer to the top than you were before."

Serafíne
Sera smirks.  Yet another neat, compact little expression that twists her mobile mouth.  More private than prominent, but - she does glance back at Nick then, at his profile, perhaps she is trying to figure out if he's being sly.  Whatever she says: her views on power and hierarchy and their definition are neither constant nor internally consistent and she doesn't much care about that, but - no.  There is the lingering frame of his smile and the sense of composure, thoughtfulness about him that she finds quietly odd and modestly charming and she remembers with perfect clarity precisely how tolerant he was of her whims as he piloted her around Trader Joe's.

Then she looks away: and Nicholas may not be avoidant, but Sera is often precisely that.  Still, her smirk has eases into one of her smiles, and it is one of her stranger smiles, as she tells him, "Naw.  I mean, you met me for the first time and I'm the way I am," (she has not yet used the word: Adept in reference to herself) " - but in my head I'm me now, sure, but I'm also: every me I ever was.  That's not the strange part."

Nicholas Hyde
Is Nicholas being sly?

That's a question for which she would have difficulty discerning an answer, from his outward expression and tone.  What he had said was voiced not neutrally, but with a sort of quiet and contemplative empathy, this sense that if Nick were Sera this is perhaps something that he'd find difficult to reconcile.  There aren't any knives there, nothing he'd dig in and twist to make a point.

Sera says she is every me she ever was, and from the Chakravanti there is this glance in her direction, some look that implies both understanding and asks for it at once.  "What's the strange part?"

Serafíne
This one of of those strange ellisions in the conversation.  Nicholas asks Sera what's the strange part and Sera is still looking at him; and she is - yes, absolutely - searching perhaps for a razor or a knife or something that has an edge and this is much less about Nicholas, the way Sera searches his face for something of the intent behind that question, than it is about Sera.  What she sees there, though, moves her -

"What held me back, initiate to disciple, was my fear of the responsibility.  Because people fucking matter to me, you know?  And I have no idea what I'm doing.    I pretty much stumbled into that seeking, too.  I was stoned out of my fucking mind and there she was, in the room, and I wasn't looking and I wasn't thinking and I really don't think, much, but I fucking love magick and I can't quite resist her."

Nicholas Hyde
Sera is looking at him, and he is not looking at her anymore, and this seems to be how their conversation will go, in part.  Nicholas too has something delicate about him, in the way that his angles are sharp and his features are thin and his eyes have a perpetual sort of world-weariness about them.  His clothing, his dark sweater and grey pants, seem to constrain him and particularly in the dimming light: he looks as though he could be a Victorian painting of some fey creature, and they're a poor stand in for some sort of silver armor or draping robe.

When she is moved to make her response, that is when Nicholas looks over at her again, absorbing her words.  There is some warmth there in the crinkling of the skin around his eyes as she makes mention of her fear of the responsibility.  "People matter to me too," he says.  "But it sounds like you...it sounds as though you've been able to stay responsible.  Responsibility doesn't always mean forcing the world to fit your vision."

Serafíne
"Hmmm."  There is a musicality to that musing hum.  This inflection of a minor third, perhaps.  Or a minor fifth: something to fit the strange sense of mournful constraint that scrims through world around Nicholas.  And the creature's voice is fine and strangely fond and also, truly: bemused.  "I guarantee you'll be the only person this week, this month, the year to say that I am both settled and responsible."

Some stirring from within the house (some thread, some awareness, some change, some affinity, but she is, beneath all this, a Seer and an Oracle so for fuck's sake shouldn't she know when her best friend, sometimes-lover, songwriting partner and partner-in-crime is climbing up the stairs from the library downstairs, ready usher her back into the world, just fractionally before he appears?

"But I'm pretty sure if I can manage it, you can too.  I mean: you're thinking about it, and it's important to you, and fuck, you have a leg up on me since I'm guessing you're smart and sober more than fifty percent of the time.  I dunno if that's comforting or not, but I also think: that you shouldn't ever have to move at anyone else's pace but your own."

Nicholas Hyde
There is this short note of mirth, something wry-touched, that comes from deep in his throat.  And here, Sera was looking for knives and razors and perhaps this is where it is, though they don't seem to be for her.  "That's the magick of words.  They mean different things to different people."

Some stirring from the house, and Nick turns his ear in that direction before recalling: ah yes, she'd said Dan was in the house.

Again, some warmth as Sera tells him to move at his own pace, and voices confidence.  And all he says is, "Thank you, Sera."

Serafíne
That stirring, which Sera senses before it actually occurs and Nicholas the moment is does resolves itself into the tall, thin figure of the consor seen through the evening sky, reflecting over the glass sliders that separate within from without.  Cold enough out here that the doors are still closed, this haze of condensation further obscuring the interior.

Sera kicks her bare calves through the water and then she is gathering herself up, quick and sure.  A subtle athleticism in her spare frame that is usually spent simply on the world of balancing like a badass in the damned shoes she prefers to wear, which has a much simpler expression when she is - as she is tonight - lithe and barefoot.  Too bad she didn't bring Sid out here tonight.  Sera misses the animal when she's absent; but then forgets she's missing her, quite as quickly.  It's for the best that three other people share the house with her: otherwise as much as Sera adores the animal, she would never remember to feed it day after day after day after day, all the mundane work of life she manages to ignore, refuse, avoid.

Nick says that words mean different things to different people, and Sera says, "I dunno.  Hermetics, man.  Somehow I think most of them would disagree."  Winks as Dan slides open the door and Nicholas thanks her and there is this moment where her instinct is to touch him.  To drop a neat little hand to his head, his hair, or perhaps his shoulder.  More, maybe.

But listen: she arrests the motion.  Glances up at Dan with a lift of her straight brows.  He's standing there, tall and lean lean lean, skinny jeans and a band t-shirt and maybe a wallet chain, probably a wallet chain, holding keys, they're dangling from his left index finger, his eyes on her.  Inquiry there: clear as anything.  The are you ready? sort.

And she is, so it seems.

"Night, Nicholas.  See you 'round."

Nicholas Hyde
The door opens, and Nick's head twists around to regard the consor as Dan stands in the threshold between the chantry house and this space outside.  There is a smile for Dan then, a sort of warm if casual regard as he lifts his hand and waves.

Sera's parting words about Hermetics draw his eyes back to her, and there is something conspiratorial, however humorous, there.  "Can't agree on everything, I suppose," he says.  There is no inkling that he is aware that Sera's instinct is to touch him, and she stops the motion before it starts anyway, and Nick stretches, arching his back and twisting his neck around until they both pop.

"Good night, Sera.  Good night, Dan!"  Slightly raised volume here, so that it reaches Dan's ears where he stands.

And the two of them leave, and Nick turns a pair of contemplative eyes back on the hot spring, and he has enough care for consequences to lift his sweater over his head and cast it aside before he soundlessly slides into the water.