AlexanderSunday night might seem like a strange night to spend out on the town to most normal people. When a person’s life is centred on the Monday to Friday/9-5 cycle, this would be well past the point that you’d be asleep. But there are those who don’t fit the normal pattern. Freaks and deviants? Well, that all depends on where you stand and how you define such things. Students, shift workers, the young, the old, the unemployed. Those who have stepped back from society and those who society has pushed away. For them, this is as much playtime as hitting the bar at 17:05 on a Friday.
It’s late. Late enough for the clubs that cater for the freaks and deviants to have closed their doors, forcing the revellers out into the streets. Some drift home, some drift to others’ homes to continue the likely-transient-possibly-lasting relationships that chance has brought together. Others drift away for food or coffee. Which brings Alex here, to this 24 hour diner somewhere not-so-far from the downtown club he’d spent the night in. He’s sat alone at a table by a window, looking out over the parking lot. A cup of filter coffee, poured from the jug a little before it turned from strong to burned, sits on the table in front of him, along with a plate with the remains of pancakes. A heavy coat has been dumped on the chair next to him, revealing a mostly-black t-shirt. Mostly, apart from some marks on the back that look like wings under UV lighting. Some bright blue combats, heavy (and warm) boots finish the look.
He sits and watches the occasional flake of snow fall from the sky, and watches the few people walking along the street outside. It will get busier soon, as the world comes back to life and people start making their ways to work.
SerafínePerception + Awareness
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 1
SerafínePerception + Awareness
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 4, 4, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]
SerafíneThe bars close in Denver at 2:00 a.m. and weekend nights there's a outrush after; places like Tom's Diner get filled up and stay that way for most of the remaining hours between last call and dawn but Sunday night, god: slow everywhere unless there's a show at the Fillmore or the Ogden and even then, after: everyone rushes home. Work, and school, and everything that defines ordinary lives begins anew, at first light.
--
Here, though. The tired looking waitress and the line cook who is fast enough that he can handle both the dinner and the breakfast menus, the sharp blast of cold everytime the doors open. Another: now. This tightly knotted but diverse little group that is larger than it seems because a few of them are lingering outside while someone holds the door to take a last drag or three on dark-papered kretek cigarettes and perhaps a guttering little roach of a once-joint. They know the space and don't bother to wait to be seated (that sign is turned around anyway: PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF it says on the other side) but slip-stream through to a round booth in a deep corner not far from Alexander's singular table.
One detaches herself, though. Plants her hands flat on the table and shimmy-shimmies her way back out as soon as she's slid in and ambles over to Alexander's.
Can't ignore her, the way she deforms the world. The way she makes it seem: brighter, sharper, stranger, wilder. She is wearing: a battered leather jacket over a man's collared, b,utton-down shirt beneath a slightly-oversized plaid cardigan. The lower hem of the cardigan hits her at the hip. The shirt is slightly longer, the scallops of the shirttails cover hit her at the upper thigh at the longest point. She is still wearing that shirt as a dress, apparently. The only thing she wears beneath are thigh-high black tights held up by (visible) lace garters with neat little black-and-white buttons on the bands. Stars march up the back of her legs where the seams of nylons were meant to lay, back when tights were nylons and nylons had seams.
"The hell are you doing out so late?" she asks with a twist of her mouth and a certain rapt scrutiny as she folds herself into the seat opposite.
Alexander[Awareness too?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )
AlexanderOne thing about this time of year: it sometimes feels that it and Alexander were made for each other. Or, maybe, close steps along a single process. The cold, to freezing, to Frozen. His resonance, so out of place during the hot summer months, seems to blend into the background during the winter. It might not be as noticeable to someone less perceptive than Sera, but then that’s something she always seems to be: perceptive. Possibly not in quite the same way as other people, depending on what combination of chemicals is running through her veins and neurons, but she always seems to have a depth of awareness that others lack.
Her presence is announced before the door opens. Or, rather, a presence is announced. The resonance that he picks up on is familiar in some ways, different in others. It’s different enough that he doesn’t assume who it surrounds. So he turns when the door opens, quickly dropping the air temperature in the diner by a couple of degrees as the cold night air races in. It’s a natural enough response, this seeing who’s arriving. It takes a few moments to narrow down its source, but then it’s obvious. Sera. It doesn’t seem like he’s been noticed, as she follows the flow of the group and settles down next to a table. Alexander had gotten used to the way that she comes and goes, with the ebb and flow of time and tide. So if she comes over, she comes over. If she doesn’t, then there will be other times and other places where they will meet.
So Alexander turns back and returns to looking out of the window. At least until he feels the movement behind him, hears the padded footsteps on the hard, tiled floor. She settles into the chair on the other side of the table, and he smiles as she does so.
The hell are you doing out so late? “Late? Isn’t it early yet? I’m pretty sure it’s early. Anyway, right now? Drinking coffee and thinking about pie. Earlier? Getting lost in flashing lights and thumping music. I seem to have lost my glowstick, though.” The coffee, rather closer to cold than hot now, is finished off. Alexander looks over to the counter, hoping to catch the notice of the waitress to get a refill. She’s already moved over to the group, scribbling down orders on her small pad of paper, so he leaves it for the moment. “How about you? Good night?”
SerafíneLate? Early? Sera favors Alexander with a neat little smirk as he takes her question and rephrases and reframes it to mean exactly the same thing and there's something about the arch-and-challenge of her quite-strangely-direct-gaze that suggests she is either not as high as one might suspect she would be: at this hour, on this sort of night; or, conversely, much, much more fucked up. And she doesn't say anything specific as he allows that he is drinking coffee and thinking about pie, just seams her lovely mouth with that arch little note at the corner.
"Wait, fuck. You had a glowstick? Were you dancing or just - " a drunken little spiral of her right hand, then. Elbow on the table, the dull gleam of the bronze ring she always wears on her index finger, the indecipherable scrawl of her tattooes dark sigils against her skin. " - monitoring the crowd for infractions against law-and-order?"
AlexanderThere may be the argument that it’s late and early, that everything, everywhere, everywhen are one. But those conversations need a great deal more privacy, and potentially a great deal more alcohol.
The comment about monitoring the crowd for infractions gets an amused huff. “Oh, my uniform is most definitely in the wardrobe tonight. Or, if you want to get technical, lying in a heap by washing machine. No, I was enjoying a night free of…” There are so many ways to end that sentence, but again there are others not so far away that might think strangely of a lot of them. “…drama.”
Alexander sets the cup back on the table and looks again at Sera, cocking his head to the side a little. “You’ve changed. And I’m pretty sure it’s not a new haircut. It suits you.”
Serafíne"I went seeking." So she tells him, straight-out. That odd steadiness still evident in her animal-bright eyes. "First time I fucked it the fuck up - " and there is a wry twist of her mouth that almost, but not quite, works itself into a grimace. Layers of nuance in a soft, bruised beat of her eyes. This note, this marking-time, the raw directness of that look cut in two by the beating of her heart as she looks at him and then: away.
And then: back again. Deep breath in, deep breath out, the whole world opening, opening, opening. " - and it sucked. Second time, though - "
Quick twist of her shoulders: that's all except for the sense of rightness about her. The surety, the strange solidity that is sometimes, somehow, the bedrock of bliss. A moment where she is very far away and then another: an orienting, a refocusing.
On Alexander.
"So your nights without drama. You get lost in the crowd and then you go out for coffee and pie and then you go home: alone?"
AlexanderThe grimace, the look away: it’s noticed, how could it be anything but noticed? Alexander meets her eyes, rests a warm hand on hers on the table. “Are you ok? I mean, you know… You seem great now, and all. But are you?” Are you fine? Or more than fine?
“I was wondering how that whole thing worked. I didn’t know it was the kind of thing you could go looking for. I thought it just kinda… happened.“ He shrugs. None of this stuff seemed to have much of a guidebook – except maybe for the Hermetics, which probably involved new and interesting places to put your magic wand – but he can’t help wondering, again: when will it be my turn?
But back to the night. “I dunno, lost in the crowd? Become part of it? Feel the music and the crowd and the light and live in that moment?” He gives another lop-sided shrug. “Something like that.”
Alone? “For now. I’m not sure my life is one I’d want to drag anyone else into right now, you know? The line of work isn’t exactly safe.”
Serafíne"I'm brilliant," Sera tosses back when Alexander asks if she is, you know, okay? And somehow it is all-at-once fitting (how she feels, now. that sense of potential-to-flame, of incandescence) and a truth, whole and entire, as much as it is a kind of prevarication. "After the first time around I was wrapped the fuck up in paradox. Sleepers couldn't see me, not even Dan, for like, a month or - "
"Sucked, man." Neat little twist of her narrow shoulders, a perfectly dismissive shrug. "I'm cool, now, though." And she is. That's true. She suffered. She: came through.
--
"You know. I've never known whether its boys, for you, or girls. Or both. Or neither?
"I mean. If you were free. If your life was one you wanted to drag someone into?"
Inquisitive cant of her golden head.
Alexander“So many things do, these days.” Alexander breaks the contact, moving his hand away to pick up his empty cup. “I’d drink to brilliant, but I appear to be sadly lacking in anything to actually drink.” He breaks eye contact again, looking again to the counter. This time he manages to catch the waitress’s eye and raises the empty cup. She flicks him a smile and a nod.
He turns back to Sera, setting the cup back at the edge of the table – easier for it to be topped up, rather than forcing the waitress to stretch over the table. “Oh, women. Men don’t do anything for me in the bedroom department. Although I’m still not sure I’d want to, you know? Not right now, anyway. One day. If the right woman came along.”
“How about you? Anyone special in your life at the moment?”
Serafíne"Mmm." One of those noises one slips into conversation, not precisely meaningless but still somehow a placeholder, but in her mouth-and-throat the placeholder is warm and strangely attentive. Alexander shoots that look at the waitress and she answers his unspoken question and our Sera follows that glance after a half-second of drunken hangtime. She is favoring the world tonight with a compressed but thoughtful smile, rubbing the meat of her thumb over the smooth band of her bronze ring while she breathes in and breathes out and, you know, is.
"There are - " curve of her striking little mouth as her dark eyes dance back to him, around him, over him, both sharp-and-seeking and strange-and-tender at once. She is feeling - delicate tonight. Like the world is made of glass and living on her tongue. " - that shit's pretty complicated, with me. You know? I'm not exactly conventional, when it comes to love or sex. Or how they recombine.
"You know that." Steady-on, the way her eyes linger, fixed and warm and fucked-up and sure, on his. "Right?"
Let the waitress come over with the coffee pot and the refill he wants. Wouldn't phase Sera, not one bit.
"I mean, surely I told you that the first time I met Pan, I asked him to make out."
Alexander“I know you’re not exactly traditional when it comes to that whole thing.“ His hands gesture some indistinct, indefinable concept. “But beyond that, I don’t really know how it works for you. Although I never really thought it was much of my business, either.” He maintains the eye contact but there’s another shrug as he leaves the subject hanging, leaving it to her as to whether to share or not to share.
It’s perhaps fortunate that Alex doesn’t have a full cup at that precise moment, especially one that he’s taking a drink from. Because Sera would quite possibly have been showered in coffee at the same time he choked on it. But they are saved that particular indignity, and his jaw figuratively hits the table. Seconds tick past as he tries to combine the image he has of the priest, as limited as it is, with his image of Sera. “Um, no. I didn’t know. How did that go down?” Fire and brimstone?
SerafínePer + Empathy
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 4 )
Alexander[Alexander doesn't seem particularly uncomfortable talking about what he knows about Sera's attitude to relationships, although he really doesn't know much more than it's not a one-man-one-woman view. He just doesn't want to pry into something that, honestly, doesn't impact on him. If she's comfortable talking about it more, he probably isn't going to find an excuse to leave.]
Serafíne"He was pretty fucking unmoved, you know? And he asked me if I wanted to confess my sins and be shriven and forgiven and I was all: fuck no, but something about the whole of it made made me think of a shadow that felt, back then, pretty dark and immoveable, and there was this inchoate moment where I had the sense that something was collapsing underfoot and he was cool about that, too.
"Invited me back to his office.
"Offered me tea, maybe. Six weeks later, we went together to hunt one of the Fallen. So. I guess it went well?"
Something supple about her expression: almost serene, strangely fierce. And that tenderness that sharpens and deepens into a complex amalgam of love. We usually break it down into pieces, don't we? Romantic, fraternal, platonic. Distinguishing in from the merely: loving. She doesn't. It all just simmers there: her surest strength, her most vulnerable weakness, that muscular heart.
"You asked me about seeking earlier. No one's told you about it?"
AlexanderAs Sera talks, Alex shifts position a little. He keeps the eye contact, keep listening, but rests his elbows on the table to rest his chin on the back of his interlaced fingers. What she says, though, doesn’t really fit in with his image of Pan. An opinionated, arrogant man who assumed that he knew best. But it wasn’t just Sera who seemed to have had a lot of time for the man. Kalen did too, as did Grace.
“I never really got to know him. Not that we had the greatest of first encounters. I don’t think I ever told you quite how close I was to taking a swing at him when he tried to stop me helping Grace in the library.” Another shrug, just as the waitress swings past the table with the jug of filter coffee. “That probably wouldn’t have ended well.”
He waits until she’s refilled the cup and drifted away again, moving on to collect plates of food to deliver to another table, before continuing. “That shadow, what was it? The Fallen?”
No one’s told you about it?
There’s a glance away, at the others in the diner. Nobody close by, nobody seemingly paying any attention to them. Certainly no more than Sera normally attracts, and it would be her getting the attention at that particular table. People have a habit of not noticing him, sometimes, especially when there’s someone as noticeable as she.
“Bits and pieces. I know it’s something to do with getting closer to your avatar, or something like that anyway. It seems like most people feel a little different after having one, although Kalen changed a whole lot more. And wasn’t that just hilarious when he tried sneaking up on me afterwards.” There’s a smile, but not much humour behind it. It hadn’t been a great time, thinking that something else had taken on Kalen’s image. “But nobody’s really said how or why it happens. I just assumed it was like waking up: it just happens when it happens.”
SerafíneHe asks about that shadow, what was it and Sera with her too-dark eyes and slightly-engorged pupils just watches him, the supple sway to the way she holds her head, not precisely still but with some sort of intimation of stillness, some facsimile, as if all the rest of the world were moving around her. Oh, hey. It is.
This quick, tight little smile. Complex, nostalgic, sorrowful. All these things in turn, braided with a dark thread that gleams gold when it is turned to the light: a compassion so specific and acute, somehow so recent, it pains her. She doesn't mind that pain, Sera. Lives within it as surely and as thoroughly and as entirely as she lives within her pleasures, and that is all there, in the space of a few breaths, in the quick-curve of her neat little mouth. But: she doesn't answer that particular question.
"Becoming closer to your avatar is sort of a - " her arms spread on the table. She cants her head and watches the distorted reflection of her body move in the dull-shine on the diner's formica table. " - dryly academic way of putting it.
"But think about the world, right? Seeking. It's not usually something that just happens to you. It's something you go looking-for. Are you getting frustrated with your limitations? Ready to take the next step?"
AlexanderAlexander watches Sera as the rest of the diner continues its motion around them. Steam swirls up from the cup at the edge of the table, drifting with the eddies of hot and cold air that move through the diner. He watches the smile come and go, waiting for the answer to the question that doesn’t find a voice. There’s so much about this woman that Alexander really doesn’t know, but it doesn’t actually matter as much as the things that he does know. She was there when he woke up. She helped him to find his feet. She tried to show him the endless wonder that she sees in the world, even though he pulled away from the contact: too much, too close. She shares what she chooses to, in much the same way that she is where and when she chooses to be.
He frees a hand, though, and rests it on hers again for a moment. Perhaps the contact is surprising, given the way that he’s withdrawn from contact in the past. But, then, circumstances were different. Contact itself isn’t something he is against, something to be avoided. He’s consciously aware of how physical contact can be comfort, and it is something he offers. Even if it’s not something he accepts, withdrawing from it when he’s the one struggling to cope.
Alex snorts when Sera says it’s a dryly academic way of putting it. “Yeah, that’s probably why it doesn’t really make all that much sense, you know? It’s not like I can take it out for dinner and date to get to know it a little better. Is it? Hell, I’m still not entirely sure who, or what, it is.” He pauses, then, breathing. Sighing. He looks down at the table, seeing the same distorted reflection in the table. Little detail, but patterns of light and shade as they block out the light from the ceiling lamps.
“Frustrated? Yeah, you could say that.” Frustration that he wasn’t good enough to hold back Kozlowski from crossing over to search for the black, endless river that they all, eventually, sleep in. Frustration that he couldn’t imitate what he had seen Sera and Kalen do when the Message had pulled them into another world, looking back to see what had flowed through time before their arrival.
SerafíneSera has these rather deft, rather small hands - thoroughly framed with ink. Tattoos on the sides of her fingers, wedged around her hand, circling her wrist. Words, mostly, though in stylized fonts so ornate or narrowly fitted onto the smallest sort of canvas they are near-to-unreadable. Dates maybe. Other scraps of script that must have had meaning to her, once.
Maybe they still do.
Alexander rests his hand on top of hers and she glances up at him, quick and keen and (yes) wry. Turns her hand over beneath his so her own is palm-up. The most absurd tattoo there: scissors with the blades on her middle and index finger, the handles on her palm, turning into a shark that corkscrews toward her inner wrist. These are not soft hands. She's a musician and has the callouses to prove it. The ring on her right index finger hums with someone else's resonance: sundrenched. soaring. Makes the room feel warmer, almost immediately. Maybe that's how she can bear the forward-march of winter in that absurd wardrobe of hers.
"Alexander. Your Avatar isn't some - vaguely indifferent god dwelling in some other-realm, you know? I mean, I suppose it could be if that's what you believe. It's part of you. It is you; some fragment of you, the same way you are some fragment of the universe, the first movement, whatever the fuck you wanna call it. However you see it."
A sharp breath in. Her head all aslant, something about the cast of the light in the room or perhaps the cast of the soul in her body makes her seem: brighter. Burning. Haloed. Maybe it's a trick of perception, the specificity of that awareness. She is smiling though, privately, aware of her self, of the breath in her lungs, of the fine, imperfect absurdity of the moment.
"I don't know how you do magick. If it's mystical or sensory or some strange, bastardized, fucked-up science-y shit, or god or the devil or a sparrow that lives in your throat and pecks the secrets of the universe onto the skin of your tongue. But you can take it out on a fucking date, if you want to.
"You can meditate. You can dream. You can learn to wake up inside your dreams and consciously move them. Some people run, or play music, or study esoteric lore and etch sigils from long-dead languages into their skin, or hike or fuck or whatever to find their way there. Through.
"I mean, it's easier if you find someone whose beliefs match yours. Or hell, a Tradition, a whole load of someones. Because they give you a skeleton, a scaffolding overwhich you can lay your skin. Through whose teachings you can find your way back to yourself. Right now, you're building the frame from the inside out, you know? That's fine, that's cool. You've got to start looking, though."
AlexanderSera talks, Alexander looks down at her hand as he listens. He lifts his hand to study the tattoos on her, following the pattern of the scissors up and around her wrist. His fingers hover over the ring, feeling the ghost of someone else there. His hand rests down on hers again, although with care not to touch the ring. That feeling, that soaring radiance, isn’t familiar to him. Maybe another who had passed on from the city, someone before his time?
“When you put it like that, it almost sounds like we’re bordering on schizophrenic. I’m told that people see their avatars in different ways. I’d ask if that was down to how we believe it should be, but I didn’t even know the things existed until after you scraped me off the road that afternoon, so I tend to think they appear in a particular way that’s specific to them. Even assuming that something from that screwed up day was mine making its presence known. I’m still not entirely sure, you know? I remember the dreams, I remember the nightmare that came after. And I’m not sure of it makes much more sense than it did then.”
Alex looks up from the table, dark eyes searching for and meeting Sera’s again. “I’ve tried talking to people about how they see the world working, but none of it really sounds right to me. I thought for a while that I’d have something more in common with Sasha, but it turns out the whole belief in fate thing is a bit of a sticking point. So all I really can do is work this out as I go along. Talking to you and Kalen does help, though. I don’t think I say this often enough to you guys: thank you.”
His hand leaves Sera’s and reaches into a pocket, pulling out a Zippo lighter. He flicks it open, sparking the flame into life with a thumb, before standing the lighter on the table. The hand waves over the flame, feeling the heat rising off it.
“I guess I’m just feeling my way through it. A lot of it so far has been… I’d say sensual, but I’m not sure that’s quite the right way of putting it. I’m not saying any magic words, I’m not praying to anything divine. It’s more that certain things sensations seem to have more depth to them than they used to. Like the first day, when everything seemed so much clearer, so much brighter.
“I think of all the people that I’ve talked to about this stuff, you’re possibly the one who gets that most.”
SerafíneDark eyes dart down as he fixes on the pattern of the sharkscissors. They weren't inked on her at the same time, but seem so unnaturally natural together that no one who guesses ever gets it right.
"Sometimes people think we're schizophrenic. Sometimes we do go mad. Or maybe some of those folks we think of as mad are just seeing and hearing entirely real, entirely different worlds. I mean, all the definitions are pretty shit, as far as I'm concerned. Where's the wonder, hmm?
"And it's fine for you to think about your Avatar however you want. Separate, mysterious, unapproachable. I didn't - " a brief, sharp breath out, " - really reach down and acknowledge and accede that she was me and I was her, all along until my last seeking. I really went seeking then. Before that, she kinda - " wry again, "pushed me into the seeking. And after, I was scared that she was going to - take me over, somehow. Swallow me whole. Steal the part of me that was me and turn me into her.
"It's kinda like a hero's journey, you know? A quest. An odyssey, maybe, or a descent to the underworld to steal the queen of summer back and banish barren winter. You can prepare yourself for it, though. You can court it, if you want. If you're ready." And god, she's passionate about this.
"When do you feel most yourself?"
Alexander[Arete, forces: sensing heat. Coincidental, so diff 4.]
Dice: 1 d10 TN4 (4) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Alexander“Oh, I can definitely believe that there are some people locked up and drugged up who are seeing things that other people are blind to.” Alex waves continues to hold his hand over the flame, looking down into its brightness as there’s a bending of reality as he pushes. “I guess I was lucky that I had you guys around when I woke up. I dread to think how hard it would have been to get some kind of control over this without it.” His vision deepens, colours becoming more distinct. More vivid, where things were hotter; duller where the cold air of the night sucked away heat. “Maybe some people just don’t believe in wonder. I can certainly understand how that can happen.” His fingers move, dancing between eddies of warm air that rise from the flame.
“It sounds like there’s no right answer to much of this. Just answers for the right now.”
When do you feel most yourself?
It takes a while before he answers that one. His brow furrows a little, showing the silence as time taken to thing rather than an attempt to avoid the question. He does answer, though, although he’s quieter than he was before. “I think I’m most sure of myself when I know what I’m doing is right. I don’t mean legal, I mean really, truly, right. Trying to give the Message his identity back. Standing up to Victoria. Trying to give peace to the families of people who have been dragged into the less wondrous side of what we do. It’s like the doubts and the questions disappear, so all there is is… me.”
Serafíne"Someone told me once," the twist of her mouth in that moment is so briefly and deeply evocative: of love, and pain, and all the accretions between, "that I should find something that made me feel - a certain way, right? And do it, again and again, until it came true. That that's ritual: right? Intention, repetition. Focus.
"I was feeling - " her eyes close. Her throat does, too, but only just, "filthy and he said I should find something that made me feel clean, and do it until it became real.
"He was right. It worked. You could engage in ritual of your own, you know. To push yourself toward that threshold, yeah? To court it. To call to whatever it is in you that animates you and your magick. And you need to listen, too.
"Sometimes they push you and you fall down a rabbit hole, like Alice, right? Sometimes they just beckon, and it's all up to you. You have to go look. You have to seek. Make sense?"
AlexanderThere’s another silence, there. A weight hanging over Alex, or holding him back. Something that doesn’t make it as easy as it could be. But, then, maybe that’s part of the odyssey. He doesn’t meet her gaze, now. No, there’s the flame and the swirling currents of air flowing above it. Her presence is felt, but beyond their table? The clattering of cutlery on crockery, the sounds drifting out from the kitchen, the other conversations carrying on around them? They drift from notice. He asks a question, although it’s maybe a little unclear who he’s asking it of. Sera? Himself? The universe, maybe?
“What happens if doing that turns you into something you don’t want to be? What happens if trying to do the right thing turns you into the monster?”
He takes a breath, letting out a slow, deep sigh. “I imagine Victoria started out thinking that she was doing the right thing. But look how she ended up. The road to hell, and all that.
“Who the hell gave me the right to decide what’s right?”
Serafíne"Everyone has the right to decide what's right. Fucking everyone. I mean, a helluva lot of them get it wrong, or don't care, or are all me first, or God, or Leviticus, or whatever. But everyone makes a choice for themselves. Right? Maybe with consultation, maybe because you read some rules in one book or another. Maybe because you feel it, and feeling is important.
"And I don't think, not for one goddamned minute, that Victoria thought she was doing the right thing. She was murdering people and eating them because she decided that they were lesser and she wanted power and didn't give a fuck how she got it. All you have to do is figure out your rules and maybe test them against other systems. You know: like no cannabalism, or do unto others as you would have them do until you, or don't be a fucking asshole.
"Alot of people get to be powerful assholes. Trying, actively trying, to do the right thing will not turn you into a monster. Especially if in the course of trying to do the right thing you periodically stop yourself and ask: am I being a cannibal? Am I fucking people over for Reason or God or because it makes me feel righteous or because I'm more concerned with saving my own ass, or my own image, or whatver? Am I helping someone? Am I taking their needs and wants into consideration? Am I treating them with love, as enlightened beings who have the right to make their own choices and their own mistakes, at least up to the point where those choices and mistakes do not cause other people harm?
"I mean, magick's hard, but that bit - all those fucking bits. I'm pretty sure you have them all down, man."
Alexander“For all their flaws, I don’t think the Order generally take on murdering, flesh-eating psychopaths. No, I’m pretty sure she started out as human as the rest of us. Along comes some way of getting an advantage over the bad guys, and then it’s one little step after another little step until? Until she had to be stopped, because all those little steps had made her into something else.” He waves his hand with a little more energy, a little closer to the lighter. The flame flickers and dances in the moving air.
“A while back you asked me what I’m scared of. I never gave you an answer.” Finally he looks back up from the flame, meeting her eyes again. “Now I have. Right now, it’s not so hard to tell right from wrong. But, hell, if seeing more of the world than before has done one thing, it’s that there are so many shades of gray. Is it right that people are preyed on because the group of bad guys who are doing it are less bad than the ones they replaced? Is it right that there are people trying to engineer a turf war with no regard to the people caught in the crossfire? The definition of right is just as fluid as the rest of reality, and cares about as much about who it grins into the ground. How do you know when the gray you're stepping into is too close to the black when the shades are almost indistinguishable?”
Serafíne"None of that is unique to what we are, Alex." The creature returns, earnest and passionate at the self-same time. "Not a goddamned piece of it. Right? It's part and parcel of all human history. It's - " a short, sharp breath out. " - hell, I'm not a fucking professor, but you shouldn't be afraid that you might someday do the wrong thing. Error is written into the process. It's inscribed in our skin. There's no - "
A supple twist of some blooming something threads her brows.
"Philosophers and ethicists and poets and preachers have been wrestling questions about absolute and relative morality for thousands of years. There is no -
"There are people who - "
An indrawn breath; this abrupt cessation has her snapping a look away from him, toward the windows. The dark and quiet streets beyond.
"Even at the end. You still have a choice. Everyone does. And it's not all monsters and shadow-wars, you know? You get to see the world. Touch the building blocks of reality. Live with awareness and intention in a way that most people never will. Remember that, okay?"
AlexanderThere’s a faint smile, tinged with a wistful melancholy. “If only it was that easy. It’s not like the monsters and the wars care who they drag into gray with them. It just seems so damned hard when there’s always something end of the world coming along. I do try, but…” He shrugs, but there’s a catch in the movement. A catch followed by a slight turn, so that he can turn his coat over on the seat next to him, so that he can unzip a pocket and briefly check the contents. There’s a brief glow in the pocket before a couple of chemical glowsticks – one green and one blue the type you snap to light up - are pulled out. He turns back, offers them to Sera.
“Sometimes it’s easier to find… if not wonder, then at least peace, in the mundane. I suppose that’s another time where I feel most myself. When I find a way to drown out the thoughts and the doubts and just, well. Be.”
“I doubt I’d be the first to find some forgotten part of myself on a dance floor, right?”
SerafíneSomething about her in that moment - the strange, elegant incision of her profile against the impressionistic darkness, the supple thread of her mouth. The way she holds herself so-still in a manner that seems - perhaps strikingly, for a Sera - so very far away.
Singular.
Aching.
But she closes her dark eyes, swallows around the knot in her throat, finds herself wanting in ways both nameless and attainable, on the other side. Gives herself over to it, too, the way she so often does. Even as he checks his pocket and reaches for the glow sticks. She's turned back to him by then, gives him a rough, wry twist of her mouth. Opens her hand for one and runs the meat of her thumb along its edge.
"Maybe it's not mundane for you, then. Maybe it shouldn't be. Maybe that shit's your ritual, you know? Movement, exertion, exhaustion. Losing yourself, fuck if I know."
AlexanderHe releases one clear plastic tube as Sera pulls it away, twisting the remaining one around in his fingers. “The hell if I know. But, I dunno. Maybe it’s like what you were saying about people putting themselves in the way. What if that’s what I’m doing, and the part of me that I know about is stopping me from finding that other part that I haven’t worked out? Does that even make sense? Like… the wood and the trees thing?”
Alex shakes his head, not really sure it makes any more sense to himself that it may – or may not – make to her. He sets the glowstick down on the table, picking up the still-lit zippo and holding it between them. The flame continues to flicker and dances in the air currents circulating through the diner, pushed into motion again every time the door opens and cold air spills into the enclosed space. The flame is watched for a few seconds more before he snaps the lighter closed.
“Does this shit get any easier?”
Serafíne"Nothing worth doing is ever really easy, Alex. You know that, right?" Quick little smirk. Less raw than her earlier expression but still somehow hunted, haunted. Withheld. "I mean, it's a cliche but there's truth to it. But if you want a smooth life, hell. Learn some probability tricks and move to the Caribbean and make yourself quietly rich and live on the beach and watch the sun set every day. The challenges get harder.
"The rest of it, though. All this back-and-forth in your head? It will get easier.
"If you let it."
Sera twists in the booth then, looks back at the crowd she came in with. They're getting up again now, having consumed some solid, greasy food, they're ready to leave.
"We're going to an after-hours club, if you wanna come."
Alexander“Yeah, I know. It would just be nice if reality could give people a break every once in a while, you know? But then that would need reality to actually care.” There is a moment of reflection when Sera suggests disappearing to a beach somewhere and twisting reality to live comfortably. It does sound nice, living without much of a care other than watching the sun set every day. But? “As tempting as that sounds, I think I’d get bored. After all, where’s the challenge in it?” A smile, a genuine smile, returns to his face. “I’ll keep in mind for retirement, though.”
Unvoiced: assuming I survive that long.
Sera twists and offers an opening for the night to continue. It had been winding down, when he had come here. He’d come for food and for coffee and to kill time before the next train to head out west. But now?
Alex rolls his shoulders, working at a knot somewhere between his shoulder blades, before picking up the so-far-untouched cup of coffee waiting at the edge of the table. “I’d like that.” The cup is quickly drained and a few notes – covering the pancakes and coffee, along with a decent tip – are left by it on the table.
