The plan was to get to Denver far earlier. Even with a chartered jet, though, a sudden and overpowering blizzard will put a cramp in anyone's plans for the day. By the time Hawksley and Collins and their snow-chain-wearing Uber Black get to the house, nearly a foot and a half of snow has fallen, it is dark, and what little melted on the roads in the hour or so before sunset is already freezing into slick ice.
He is in a foul mood. Circling in that goddamn jet, sitting in that goddamn jet, eating everything that was on that goddamn jet. Collins has been snapped at more than a few times, even when he wisely had their driver stop somewhere to pick up takeout so they could eat upon arrival at the house. Nevermind that plenty of people had their flights cancelled or turned back to their orginating locations. Or that if they were stuck, they were stuck with hundreds of other passengers, crammed in and unable to move. Nevermind that if they were hungry, they had peanuts. Or no drivers, even if they got to Denver successfully.
It isn't that Hawksley is unaware that other people suffer more greatly than he does. It isn't that he lacks all compassion entirely. It's that right now, he is hungry. He is tired. He is impatient, and angry, and other people's shitty lives are not his fucking problem.
The driver pulls up right to the door for them. It is paid from Collins's expense account, not that of D. Livingston. They keep his name off of many things. Most of his belongings will be coming later, driving cross-country, but the driver and Collins and Hawksley grab a few suitcases and bags from the back of the SUV. The driver is given a trip for this, and then he departs. Collins opens the front door with his keys and holds it for Hawksley, who tromps in, neglecting to stomp snow from his boots. He is dressed in a warm woolen coat and a heavy scarf, and his hair is untouched by snow since it stopped falling before he was even allowed to land.
It is dark inside, but not cold; when Hawksley lived here they had Nest installed. They turned it on from the airport and it is a comfortable seventy inside already. Hawksley breathes in deeply, scanning the house with those piercing eyes of his. Drops one suitcase in the entryway, then a messenger bag atop that, taking off leather gloves. Collins, behind him, turns on a light, flooding the foyer. Much of the furniture was left behind, covered with drop-cloths. Linens were stored in cedar-lined closets and so forth. Things like dishes and cookware were put away but left here. More expensive art and sculpture, silver, crystal -- these were all put in storage. Books and anything magical in nature, anything Hawksley would use, was brought with them to New England.
And Sera had keys, and was told she could come and go as she pleased. If anything had happened here he needed to know, he'd know.
"Let's eat," Hawksley says, after settling himself back in this place, reaching up to shed his coat. Collins has already hung his own up, and dutifully trades Hawksley a bag of takeout -- Thai -- for his coat, to hang that up as well. Hawksley opens the bag and peers in, sniffing, looking for the styrofoam package marked Pad Thai - 5.
SerafíneAwareness?
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (7, 7, 8, 8, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 7 ) [Doubling Tens]
Hawksley[*throws up hands*]
SerafíneAll of this is a little bit hallucinatory. Collins takes Hawksley's coat and Collins turns on the lights and there is the foyer, quite as it was left and Collins has the pad thai and Hawksley is settling himself back into the space. The shrouded furniture, the deeper shadows beyond the front hall. The swimming gray light that seeps in through the curtains, which are still mostly drawn. This house is old enough and huge enough that there is sometimes noise even when it is otherwise empty - something somewhere settling, or rattling - and now there is a storm outside, and they full of noise themselves. Stomping the snow from boots, peeling off layers, shaking off the irritation of the many, many, affronts and delays of the day so there is no reason, no reason at all for either Hawksley or Collins to hear the soft slap of bare feet on parquet floors, but -
- there she is. Sera: one hand on the frame of the archway that leads deeper into the grand public spaces of the mansion. Her hair is loose, her eyes a little too dark and remarkably wide and her mouth is seamed and she has a puzzled, fraught little expression incised with especial neat-ness between her straight blond brows.
She is looking at them as if they are very strange things indeed. Or: no.
Fuck that. She isn't looking at them at all.
All she sees is him but she sees him as she saw him once, some years ago, outlined against the sky, surrounded by strangers, and she doesn't really understand whether he's an hallucination or a real thing in front of her because drugs and dreams and absence: you know?
So she just stares.
And kinda forgets to breathe.
HawksleyYou'd think he'd check to see if they were alone. You'd think maybe with things in the world like Technocrats and Nephandi and so forth that he'd be constantly aware, paranoid, have everything on fucking lockdown all the fucking time like so many other mages who like to talk about The War, the sorts of mages who fling themselves dramatically into oncoming danger To Protect The Ones They Love on, like, a weekly basis.
Hawksley has never. Likely will never. Hawksley doesn't seem to be afraid of anything, and yes, to a fault. It is not his only flaw, but it is perhaps his least immediately annoying one.
So: he doesn't know that Sera is here when Collins floods the foyer with light. Maybe she came here before the blizzard began or just after it ended, before the sun set. Maybe she's been here all this time and noticed when the heat kicked on, activated by some far-away app on some far-away phone. (He has the Galaxy 7 now, because that is the newest, and Collins always gets him the newest and transfers all his contacts and apps and everything so that Hawksley barely notices he has a new phone. This is how it's been for years.)
But: he does know that Sera is here now when he lowers the plastic bag in his hands, rustling as he takes out the styrofoam with the Pad Thai in it, hands the bag back to Collins. Collins also has Pad Thai, but it is not a level 5 spicy. It is, despite the man's rather European features and tastes, actually far hotter than Hawksley's serving. And Hawksley just knows the motherfucker is still going to add hot sauce to it like he always fucking does.
He is looking up, and Sera is standing there, and his reaction is to wrinkle his brow a bit, eyebrows tugging together. He's still wearing that big scarf wrapped -- draped -- around his neck and shoulders, even though his coat was hung up. He hasn't even bothered taking off his boots. He didn't even kick the snow off, because he doesn't think to do these things. These tidy, respectful things.
Hawksley glances over at Collins, who is also looking at Sera now. Confirming that Collins also sees her, Hawksley turns his head back, blinking once. That little wrinkle remains between his eyebrows. And she stares. And he watches her, and after maybe four or five protracted seconds of silence he lifts his eyebrows instead, looks at her like um, hello? and says, like a goddamn asshole:
"You just gonna stand there?"
SerafíneHe says, you just gonna stand there, like a goddamned asshole and it is that: his voice and maybe the squeak of the styrofoam that cause her to blink. Once, really: and she closes her eyes on Horus and she opens her eyes on Hawksley.
"Fuck you." Ragged breath out, the edge of a laugh, maybe it's a laugh, maybe it's something else. The quick slash of her smile. Hard to know how to take it but she's already in motion then. In motion? She's running, actually, and she's quicker than you'd think a girl like that could be.
Hawksley may or may not be able to read the body language: but that is a headlong run. The creature is clearly about to hug the fuck outta him: styrofoam container of pad thai or no.
HawksleyFuck you she says and he grins, smirks really, and then, um
she's coming over. Running, actually. Which surprises him, somewhat. She runs, barefoot, and he has about a second to pass his Pad Thai to Collins, who caught Sera's running before Hawksley did and is ready to take it. So this is how it goes: Hawksley has dinner, then Hawksley has nothing, and then Hawksley has Sera. Make whatever metaphors of this that you want to. He catches her -- of course he fucking catches her, he's not one hundred percent asshole after all.
He is hugged. He is hugging, tightly.
For a while.
They stop hugging at some point. Collins has exited the foyer with dinner; on cat's feet he left them be and is somewhere else, plating the Pad Thai and saving some for Sera too in case she wants it. Hawksley is setting Sera on her feet again, but not quite letting her go as quickly. Takes a look at her. Thinks of pushing her hair out of her face but does not.
"You living here?" he asks, curious.
SerafíneSera hugs him for just as long as she can, contained and sharp and she still has that warm-sleep-smell about her and something else, some combination of smoke and Darjeeling and whiskey and sandalwood or maybe patchouli that is: Sera in the wintertime. Snow a bit: because it is snowing. Because she might adore winter but unlike sungods she usually likes winter just fine too. The magick of it, you know? The descending hush, the stillness, the snow angels. Well: she smells of all of those things and also of magick which he may or may not smell. Can't help it.
She loves magick, too.
--
So: she hugs him and they stop hugging and it is silly. He is has given away his coat but he is scarf and she is much, much closer to bare and now she is on her bare feet again, look how the world has returned to her. He thinks about pushing her hair out of her face. It's grown or something? He can't really see the side-fringe, mostly because she's parting it on the other side, so that the bulk of the curls fall to the right not the left.
Is she living here?
"Nah." She tells him, and if he has not let her go, she does break away here. Returns herself to her/self quite the way he returned the world to her when he put her back down on her feet. Doesn't go far though and she's also watching him; watching his face, attentively, searchingly. "Came - sometime last night? Dan said something about the weather but I said fuck the weather." And she's about to go on and say something else, but there's a moment of arrest.
Then: a neat shake of her head, this return of lilting inquiry, and an embedded awareness, concern.
"Hawksley. Is everything okay? What are you doing here?"
HawksleyDoes he smell her, when he hugs her?
He has never not done so. Hawksley has enough care and refinement and defense mechanisms to do so subtly, inhaling deeply rather than sniffing at her like a dog, but that doesn't change what he is at his core. Of everyone, Sera has always sensed that core, understood it clearly from the start. This does not make him special; she is like that with everyone. She cannot help what she knows, and what she understands. What she loves. Even if she could, he doubts that she would stop herself.
Under coat and scarf there is a black cashmere sweater -- charcoal, really -- and a faint hint of a blue shirt beneath that. His jeans are dark and his boots waterproof. Snow is melting off his feet and the puddle extends to her toes. His arm is around her waist. He has not broken that contact.
"Fuck the weather," he agrees, though more adamantly, more angrily, because he just spent far too much time locked in a flying machine that he couldn't get out of.
His eyebrows flick upward again as she asks. He thinks a moment, frowns, and nods. "Everything's okay," he confirms, and his arm slips away from her waist, but only so that his hand can come to rest on the small of her back. "Come on. I'm starving. I'll explain."
SerafíneSera is still Coming Down from something, though she is far enough away from the acute effects that only traces of the drug linger in her system. The very last threads of last night's high. Strangely firing synapses; bright little bursts of movement, awareness, sensation, a kind of strange ache in the very back of her head, and these fragmentary hallucinations at the periphery of her senses which dovetail very precisely with her revelatory awareness of him. Of the space around him and the shadows between and last time she saw him and the deep, abiding hush of the world after a storm. Of his hand on her spine.
Her eyes are on his profile as he first considers, and then answers, her question. And he is so radiant and alien and human and present in her layered vision and she is so attentive, and he's okay, and he's starving, and says "Okay," but something about the moment has her leaning forward to plant a kiss at approximately the midpoint of his collarbone before she turns to walk with him deeper into the house.
Sera reaches for Hawksley's hand as they walk. Her left, his right, if he'll give it. And if he does, then she will have the persistent sense that she is someone is grasping both of her hands and pulling her quite insistently up into the sky. She's quiet as they walk, though she does tell him that Dan's here, which he must have assumed. How else does Sera get anywhere? It's Dan or Uber or her own two feet because she knows herself quite well enough and also knows that she doesn't want to murder anyone by driving-while-Sera.
HawksleySo familiar is he with Sera being on something -- a drug, a bottle of whiskey, an orgasm -- that he has always found her occasional sobriety to be unsettling and unnatural, skin-crawlingly so, as though someone else's opinions have taken over her limbs and made her parrot out bullshit about discipline or blah-blah-blah. This, these coming-down moments, are far more comfortable.
They are moving. She is pausing, and kissing his collarbone. Or rather: the layered fabric above his collarbone. All the same, he takes a breath at the contact,
and then they move on. Their hands fall together and she's the one who reached for him but in his memory it will be simply that their hands fell and found each other and connected like magnets. She says Dan is here, and he wasn't really thinking about Sera came to be here but sure, it's nice to know. He doesn't ask about Dan. He has no idea that Dan is angry. It is debatable whether Hawksley would give a fuck about the opinion a Sleeper has of him, even if that Sleeper is a Consort, a friend, what-have-you. He doesn't really comment on Dan being here, at all.
In the kitchen, the Pad Thai has been unwrapped and plated. Collins is nowhere to be seen, but there are two plates, and a bottle of white wine poured into two glasses already, and a single light above the stove is turned on, the room still dim but for the moonlight bouncing off freshly-fallen snow and into the windows.
Hawksley unwinds his scarf and tosses it across a barstool, pulling up another one and sitting down. He digs in immediately, and only after he has slaked the immediate pangs of his hunger does he finally get into what is going on.
Which is to say, he says:
"So. I'm moving back. The truck is on its way with everything else."
SerafíneSera perches on another one of the barstools. Legs dangling in way that is very much her own; that edge of abandon, which can be read as childlike, or something entirely else. Only lets go of his hand because he needs to take off that scarf and eat and kitchen! means that they've arrived, and she takes in the perfectly present absence of Collins with a brief but thoughtful wonder that would never enter Hawksley's mind in the first place, let alone occupy it along with the wonder of the moonlight and the surreality of Hawksley's sudden appearance in the midst of a blizzard, after so long an absence.
Hawksley eats. Sera... doesn't really, but hey there's wine and that sounds like a very civilized way to handle an acid hangover. She watches the moonlight on snow and the light grazing through the white wine and she watches Hawksley eat with such unabashed tenderness that it hurts when she thinks about it.
So, she doesn't. Think about it.
He tells her that he's moving back. She's quiet, but by now her eyes are fixed on him.
A beat. And then, "Is that a good thing?"
(He said: everything's okay, and she believes him. But - )
SerafínePer + Empathy
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 6 ) [Doubling Tens]
HawksleyHe eats like a man in his twenties, and drinks like it, too. Pours himself more wine and refills her glass when he does so. Eats the milder Pad Thai because he cannot handle the gut-immolating shit that Collins eats. She asks if that's a good think and he blinks, eyebrows drawing together, looking over at her.
HawksleyPerception + Empathy
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )
Hawksley[Hawksley is hungry, and thirsty, and tired from traveling and still annoyed by the blizzard and its effects on his traveling. He's not unhappy to see Sera, but he wasn't really expecting this right off the bat. He's wary that she's going to pry and sort of (unfairly) gearing up to be irritated with her if she seems to be going that direction. He wants to just be here, and be with her, and not Get Into Anything.]
Serafíne[It is strange to see Sera so oddly: restrained, but she is balanced on a strange fulcrum: she is so very happy to see him. Some part of her is ridiculously happy that he is back. Another part of her is quite: wary. But it feels strange and selfish to her to be that happy when she knows some of the circumstances that sent him away, and nothing of their resolution. So, she's asking him again: if this is good for him, and if he's okay.]
HawksleyHe looks at her for a moment like that, half-frowning, and then it smooths. His features ease. He nods. "Yes," Hawksley says, and firmly. He lays down his fork.
"My mother is... fine," he tells her. It's a hard word to say about a woman who has lost her mind, lost son, husband, everything. What he means is to reassure Sera that his mother has not died, she has not banished him. "The fuckhead's lawyers finally settled, and she's going to be very well taken care of. But... I'm no real help to her," he adds, more quietly. "Now that all that is over and done with, this is where I want to be."
SerafíneSera listens, and she watches him, and that strange and tender carefulness implicit. Closes her eyes near the end and nods.
"I missed you." Like, duh. He probably figured that out when she flung herself across the entrance hall at him, nevermind her bare feet and the melting snow on the marbled floors, the bite of chill in the air. "Missed seeing your head buried in some boring old-ass book, too. When's the truck supposed to show up with your library?"
HawksleyHis nostrils flare slightly as he breathes in. Exhales more slowly. "Soon," is all he says of the stupid truck. Watches her for a bit, and then he sighs, and smiles. "I am so tired," he confesses. "My eyes are burning."
Serafíne"Finish your dinner." she tells him. There is another quick skim of her mouth over the mouth of her wineglass. She drinks the wine as quickly as he pours it. Of course she does. Not quite a smile, but - " - then come to bed."
Hawksley"So bossy," he chastises her, teasingly, as though a moment a go he wasn't just whining about needing to sleep. He kicks her barstool, lightly, with the toe of his boot. "'Come to bed', she says, in my own goddamn house."
Serafíne"About your own goddamned bed, too." Sera rolls her eyes; quite neatly. The world around her spins, just so and she rather likes that though she does close her eyes to bring her back to herself. Opens them again and he's still there, in the flesh with a mouth full of pad thai.
Sera pours out the rest of the wine. Empties the bottle into his glass and her own. If it isn't enough to make him tipsy, too, half-a-bottle is at least enough to ensure a decent night's sleep after the long day of traveling and travel-delays he has had. She tells him that she's just thinking about his own health and welfare: if he falls off the barstool from exhaustion, he'll sleep on the kitchen floor. She'd never be able to drag his muscle-y self up the stars. And she does say: stars, then corrects herself stairs. While he eats, she tells him that she's having an Easter party, and well: of course. It'll start some time and maybe it'll end. She has new dress! that is black and see-through and looks like a flower-shoppe exploded and she wanted the party to be in the garden, but: Denver, and: winter.
Dan will come down at some point. He's not just hiding away, and anyway, he wants gatorade or tea or food or whatever. Wants to tell Sera that he texted Tre and asked him to go check on the roof and make sure the tarps are holding. Sera doesn't really know what Dan is talking about but she smiles at him. Dan says hey man, or something like it, to Hawksley, while he gets a drink or forages. He's not really all that happy about the strange series of events tonight, but he doesn't make a show of it. Maybe a glance from Sera to Hawksley and back again but when a Sleeper - an aware Sleeper -
is in the room with them: where else would he look?
---
After dinner: bed. Sleep. Well, sleep for Hawksley. Sera has only just woken from a long, fitful, dreaming-LSD-in-her-system nap and curls up to cuddle, and be close to him, and drift for a while.
And wonder, the whole time, whether any of this is real.
She doesn't trust her head. And her heart: wants what it wants.
Which is very good reason not to trust it, too.
HawksleyHawksley does finish his dinner. He doesn't drink a half-bottle, just two glasses, because otherwise he'll wake in the middle of the night, fitful and dry and with a pounding head. He is listening while she talks, though he is eating through it. Stars and stairs. Easter party. New dress. He does chime in: "It will be warm. It's Denver," which is the same argument but for a different point: tomorrow they will wake to a blazing sun, a warm breeze, melting the blizzard away with shocking speed.
When Dan comes down Hawksley does glance at him, and doesn't know (or care) what Dan is talking about. He gives Dan a nod, but otherwise ignores him. His house has over a dozen rooms; he doesn't ask where Dan is sleeping. He doesn't ask where Sera is sleeping; he just assumes she has a made-up bed somewhere, and he'll sleep there, regardless of whether it is the master suite or not.
--
They go upstairs. Hawksley undresses and washes up, water on his face and toothpaste in his mouth. He doesn't usually bother with pajamas but he does tonight, a loose pair of pajama pants that are a nod to the weather, or something. He hits the bed hard, looking at the ceiling, exhaling. Neither of them have questioned whether she will be in bed with him; both of them assumed he would go to bed, to whatever bed she is occupying, and perhaps he'll pretend in his mind that it's because that's the one with sheets on it but a call to Collins and he could fix that.
Doesn't.
His arm to one side pillows her head. His eyes, watching the ceiling fall closed. His breath soon steadies. He sleeps; she drifts. Wonders.
Wants.
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