Backlash

Jim

Jim has been spending very little time inside since their arrival at the cabin; while he doesn't seem at all familiar with his surroundings out in the wilderness, it manages to blossom a new curiosity in him. He's been walking the paths and along the nearby river. In one hand he always seems to have one of the naturalist books left by the landlords for renters, though he assumes the collection have seen little use thanks to their lack of wear and tear.

It's night and he's building a small fire in the backyard, in the middle of a clearing, the right distance from other trees and away from where their branches reach out. Just like the book says. He rolls a few logs in newspaper. Just like the book says. He lights the twigs first, positioning them inside a little teepee of wood, so that the small fire will have the air it needs to grow. Just like the book says.

And finally, he falls back on his ass near the fire, feet close enough to feel its warmth, a enamel cup from the cabin's cupboard full of coffee in one of his hands. There's a big brown grocery bag sitting next to him.

He's wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, because it seemed like the right thing to wear out here, dressing up like he imagines he should and enjoying playing the part. Shoeless and wild, though, he's more Huckleberry Finn than Tom Sawyer. There's still that addled look in his eyes, and the way they reflect the fire in little explosions like a kaleidoscope turns the world to broken glass, might make one wonder what Molotov cocktail of thoughts brew within.

And as one gets closer, they might be able to smell the liquor on his breath and mixed in with that steaming cup of coffee, its essence caught in the smokey air.

Pan

Out of the distance comes the rumbling of a V8 engine whose tires roll across the gravel and the dirt led up to the cabin as easy as waves across sand. The lights cut brief swatches through the darkness and then stop when the driver stops the truck a ways away from the cabin. Sharp silence where before was that sound and for a time Jim has nothing.

Footsteps. Even and slow but not certain.

When the visitor comes upon the backyard and the fire in the backyard it reveals himself to be the priest. No black clothing tonight. The one time he decides not to wear black he gets blood all over himself. It's dried now but there was a lot of it and the front of his plaid shirt has gone rust and dead with it. Great splotches on the thighs of his stonewash jeans. Until he comes to the fire they can make no pattern of it.

He walks a straight line and looks no worse for the ghost of epistaxis on his clothing but something in his eyes has gone dark. Blame it on the light or the absence of it. He does not lift a hand in greeting to them.

"Where's the girl?" he asks.

Sera

"I'd just douse it with gasoline." That's how Sera announced her presence as she approaches the fire. 'Course, Jim could hear the Jeep crunching down the graveled drive, the engine coughing a half-dozen times before it finally shut itself off, and then her boots on the gravel and the grass and clomping through the cabin, front-door-to-back-door. She's brought supplies and her supplies include more than coffee and milk and potatoes and take-out Indian food: they include a replenished stash of decent liquor and hashish tonight, perhaps a few other things. Books even that he wanted from the library, for which she 'borrowed' her housemate's library card, not bothering to sign up for one of her own.

Maybe he could even smell her cigarettes on the wind; the particular aroma of sweet cloves and Chanel No. 5 that she sometimes wears, and the city on her skin. All honey I'm home.

She is wearing a tiny pink gingham tee covered in ironic bumble bees, torn, cut-off denim shorts, fishnets and combat boots covered in buckles. Sera does not bother to dress the part of wilderness explorer. She does not seem to adapt to her environment, though the truth is she likes it out here fine. If there's a place close by to go bouldering she even suggests it to Jim as something they should try.

Pan walked straight for the fire; skipped the cabin and it's the cabin from whence Sera emerges.

"She's asleep." The response is to Pan's shadow; cast back from the fire. "Sid's here," she tells them both in the next breath. Then her glance at Pan resolves itself into something sharper and more intent as she takes in the blood spattered across his shirt and jeans. Her alarm is immediate and she starts half-jogging toward him, reaching out like she expects him to collapse at any moment. As if she could begin to support his weight.

"Are you okay? What happened to you?"

If he lets her get close enough, she circles an arm around his waist as easily as she linked elbows with him the night he came to see her at the bar. Maybe gives Jim one of those 'come help' glances, even though it's pretty clear that the priest is still operating under his own power. Doesn't matter. Sera even tries to take Pan's arm and drape it over her own shoulders. Intent with concern.

Jim

Pan walks into the undulating circle of growing firelight and the blood is visible. Somehow both redder and blacker in the flicker of the flames.

Jim gets to his feet in a hurry and makes his way to where Sera is already trying to act as crutch for the padre (whether he needs it or not), nimbly jumping the fire small fire to do so. That cup of Irish coffee is left where he'd been sitting, Sera's own panic and caring nature as infectious as ever.

Especially to someone who cares about the state of others as much as Jim.

"In one piece?" Curious. It could be an overused term describe Jim, but it's an apt one as his eyes squint and he kneels to see where the blood might have been coming from. He's appraising Pan's form for injuries and holes that shouldn't be there as both of them await an answer.

[ Perception + Medicine. ]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 4, 5) ( fail )

Sid

[everybody shhh, Sid is trying to be quiet (which is not the same as being sneaky): dex+stealth, diff +1]

Dice: 3 d10 TN7 (6, 6, 8) ( success x 1 )

Pan

What happened to you?

"I'm fine."

In the dark Jim can glean nothing. Sera rushes to him and he does not insert distance between them but he does not welcome or wilt into contact either. An arm around his waist reveals no fresh blood and no objects where they ought not to be and the arm she tries to put over her own shoulder hangs heavy and useless as the wooden crosses in his congregation's sanctuary back in Denver.

If her hand travels far enough around his hip she'll find a rosary draped half out the pocket. It tells her nothing even as it screams with recent Working. Normally it hums or sings but not tonight. Tonight it is loud and persistent and futile. She cannot see the blood on the wooden beads in the dark.

In one piece?

"I'm fine," he says again. No force in his repetition. His patience has not ebbed. He pulls away from Sera to turn back and look at the cabin lit up and looming behind them. No sign of the porch or the girl. "Has he been here?"

Sera

"You're not fine." Intent and insistent and far more sober than he might imagine; nevermind that Jim at least can also smell the sweet, herbal scent of hashish or pot she's smoked tonight clinging to her hair and skin. That's how she conned Sid into joining her. She needed a designated driver. Pan slips out of her circling arm but she shoots Jim a worried glance and steps in front of the priest instead, pulls out the tails of his shirt from where they're tucked into the jeans, and starts unbutton the plaquet all stiff with blood and awkward. "You're covered in blood. Will you please sit down?"

There are some logs out here, a handful of chairs maybe scattered around the fire pit. If not, she'll go get him one.

"Before you fall down?" Quiet and persistent and insistent, all of this, as she unbuttons his shirt and starts looking for the source of blood.

Though some of that activity ceases, stills when Pan asks if he has been here. The sketch of immediate awareness, of a stark sort of alarm is bright and physical and breathless all around her. Her glance at Jim: a question.

The look she shoots the dark cabin: a tattoo of fear in her eyes. As much for Leah as of him. And the gods know that she is pretty fucking alarmed by the very idea of him, so that look is stark in its intensity.

Still, she pulls it back. Doesn't feel him in the air around here and hasn't, not since they've been. "I don't think so - " the upward lilt of her voice at the end, leaving Jim to finish the answer, " - why?"

Sera

Perception + Medicine

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Sid

Yes, Sid is there. She'd lagged behind Sera on the way into the house because she'd stopped on the drive to look up at the cabin, then out and all around. Taking in the surroundings, but not the way a tourist might, or someone out to enjoy some nature. Her gaze is quick, furtive, paranoid as she makes sure there's no one hiding behing that tree or lurking around that thorn bush.

Sera was already gone inside when Sid was satisfied with her survey. And she was nowhere to be found when Sid finally stepped through that front door. There was a minor detour, a quick trip to the kitchen to wash her hands, when she heard the back door close.

So it takes a little time for the quiet woman to make her way toward the low light of the little fire. And when she sees them there, the trio clustering together, she stops in her tracks, and she frowns.

Weeks. It's been weeks and the most Awakened she's been around at one time had been the other day in front of the church. Even then, even with three she'd been nervous. And now here they are, all congregating together.

Well. She can't leave. For one thing, they came in Sera's Jeep. For another, she's already gotten this close, might as well close the gap. Hugging her upper body, the sleeves of her sweatshirt pulled tightly over her fists, she makes her way down the slope. Slowly. Placing one foot before the other, not in an attempt to sneak up on them or go unnoticed - that would be pointless - but she's cautious.

She gets a little closer and she gets the very distinct impression that she's intruding somewhere she ought not to be. Stopping again a few feet out, Sid hangs back.

Jim

[ Perception + Alertness ]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )

Jim

They could guess who Pan was talking about.

And Serafine had just said Sid and Leah were both in the house. That's enough for Jim. He gives the holy man a look, but doesn't wait for confirmation. He turns and runs barefoot toward the steps, the thud of calloused flesh on wood carrying him hurriedly up the steps, onto the porch, flinging the door open and into the cabin to find out if there is anyone inside that shouldn't be.

Jim manages to miss Sid on the way out as he's on the way in the other door.

He checks Leah's room first, peaking in only by a sliver of light that comes through the crack he opens in the door, confirming her presence in her bed, sleeping as she should be.

He doesn't yell, his tone even and conversational, inquisitive as he walks through the cabin trying to find Sid. "Sid?" One room. "Sid?" Another. Until she answers and he hones in on it, or until he finds her, whichever comes first.

She never answers.

It's not long until every light in the house is on, except for Leah's room. Maybe Jim does think the light can ward away the darkness. He's back on the porch, his entire round trip having taken a good minute or two. He's catching his breath. Ascending the stairs, back looking down toward the fire, and finally he spots her. Hanging back. Skirting the shadows. That familiar red hair, even in the darkness, is recognizable as he comes down the same slope. "There you are." Grateful for it.

Pan

He takes the short woman's hands off his shirt one time, twice, before resigning himself to the inadequacy of repeating himself and letting her pluck at the small plastic discs. Holds his arms out then as if submitting to a pat-down. Aims his eyes up at the white-dotted sky.

Pleading and coaxing has him drawing a breath and letting it go in an audible thing butted up against a sigh. She doesn't answer his question quickly enough so he repeats himself.

"Has he been here?"

She doesn't think so. She doesn't find any injuries on him because he is not injured. He wears no scars, hides no bandages or braces beneath the shirt. Gives her a moment to satisfy her own curiosity and then looks down as if assessing the state of his wardrobe hours after the fact. If she insists upon tugging him towards the fire and the logs and the chairs there he doesn't fight her.

I don't think so - why?

Jim runs off into the cabin. Pan watches him go, yanks the stiffened halves of his shirt back around his exposed midsection.

"I saw him," he says. "Near here. Hours ago. That's why--"

He doesn't finish the sentence, amputates his own reasoning. Sits down near the fire and scrubs his face with a hand.

Sera

"Stop it."

Serafíne's voice is firm and low and focused the second time he pulls her hands away, before he finally gives up and submits to her survey. Her shoulders twist sharply because each time he pulls her hands away from his shirt, she pulls her hands away from his grasp and goes calmly back to her work. Her hands are cool on his chest - she was, after all, just restocking the fridge - and she has just enough knowledge of anatomy to be dangerous, checking his ribs and flank, frowning all the while. Aware of Jim's charge for the cabin and listening and taut with awareness of the nightlands all around them; stiffer than she had been.

When she's satisfied that Pan is uninjured, Serafíne lets him go. She's still standing close, the fire behind her, her gaze glittering with its reflected light and cut back to the cabin.

Her breathing is sharp and rapid; she works to control it, to pull it back into a steady rhythm, to remind herself of the rhythms of her body. The beating certainty of her heart in her chest.

The way it squeezes sharply when Pan says he saw Him. Near here. and Hours ago.

She breathes out, through the nose and mouth and takes a step back from him, back toward the fire.

"You were scrying him." She supplies, quietly. "He did this to you."

She's biting her lip, sharply enough to draw her own blood. The twinge of pain cuts through the low hum of her quiet high, helps her settle herself back into her body and then push her awareness outward on a tangle of sensation.

"What'd you see?"

Jim will feel it most acutely. He's Worked with her often enough to know the gleam of her resonance in the air. Pan is closest to her though, and she's looking up at him, in the variegated shadows cast by Jim's small fire, with her vaguely bloodshot gaze. She reaches out and takes the priest's hand, twining his fingers thoughtlessly with her own.

Fucking Cultists.

Sera

[So, yeah. Life/Mind/Prime scan. :) I realize that Ariel isn't around but I wanna do MAGICS. Dif 4 -1 for specialty focus.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (3, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Sera

Extending Dif +1

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (4, 6) ( success x 2 )

Sid

[what is happening: percept+awareness]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 3 )

Sid

In his rush, Jim passes by Sid without noticing her. Hard to believe with her resonance practically howling in the air around her, desperate and ecstatic all tangled up together as she makes her careful way closer to the fire.

And as she does, she keeps her mind and her eyes open. It's habit, instinct, the result of her intense paranoia.

What she sees, what she feels, what she hears in the tones of the other's voices, it doesn't make her think this is just a trip to a cabin in the woods or whatever it was Sera said this was going to be. Sid feels the tension and it feeds her own, tightening up her spine and stiffening her shoulders. Her jaw clenches. She doesn't even know what or who they're talking about. While she was aimlessly wandering the city, they were dealing with other things. While she was hiding (from that nameless enemy, from them, from everything) they were out, engaged, involved.

If they were in the city she would leave as soon as she felt Sera's Working. She would turn around and walk away when she was acknowledged, There you are. She could go, anyway, but she doesn't. Maybe it's curiosity. Maybe it's something else.

She turns her head when she hears Jim return. The shadows thrown from the fire intensify that look of worry she always seems to wear.

"Who..." she starts to ask him, but stops. Turning toward the others, she tries again. "Who's 'he?'"

Jim

Jim stands at Sid's side, only as close as she will approach it. It's equal parts prodding and following, because he only walks as fast (or as much, if at all) as she will, and his arm doesn't come out to usher her closer.

"We met the man that was after Leah. Met him and saw him with his own little gang of droogs a la Clockwork Orange. Let her come with us," and then, he's noticing Pan again. He holds up a t-shirt and pair of shorts he'd been gasping in his hand at his side, something he'd grabbed while checking every corner of the house.

"In case you want to get changed. How is he?" First to Sera. And then, to Pan. "What happened?" And emphasis on the what, like he wants an exact answer. "Was it straight to the point? Or did he have something to say? Are they trying to go to war?"

Pan

And Pan doesn't pull his hand away the way he pulled her hands off of his shirt. It hangs now for their nearness to the fire. He does not return the buttons to their rightful alignment and his hand is warm and strong in hers. Its callouses do not match hers. He does not have a musician's hands.

So she works a minor miracle to see beyond the edges of their vision and the woods around them. The burbling of the river and the crackling of the fire and the animal enchantment of her working keep him looking straight ahead into the dirt and the burning twigs instead of up at the sky, away from whatever he's trying to avoid seeing when he looks up at the sky.

She asks him and he does not hesitate so much as he collects. Annie didn't ask him but Annie was behind the wheel when it happened. Jim comes back. Wants to know what happened. It's a reasonable request and the flickering of the clean clothes draws him back to his feet, draws his fingers back from Sera's grasp.

"I prayed for sight," he says. "I was proud, and impatient, and we saw each other. It's like I told you. He's stronger than I am. He grabbed me, like right in the middle..." His hand finds the top of his head and worries his hair but can't find the words to elucidate his meaning. Can't find the words to tell them what he saw, either, so he doesn't even try. "... and then I blacked out."

Sera

"He's okay," Sera breathes out the words, still holding the priest's hand in her own. Now as much for the animal comfort of human contact as for the faint stimulation of her Work. The assurance is shunted back to Jim when he asks how the priest is, and strange how steady she is when they've seen her so very, very undone. "Healed himself or someone healed him.

"Annie, maybe."

That's a fucking helluva lot of blood on his clothes.

Then he pulls his hand back and she turns, watching his shadow as he responds to Jim. Her breath comes out all in a rush when Pan is finished with his story, and her left hand slips to the small of his back as the big priest struggles for words. Her eyes are on Jim now, though, and glittering in the firelight.

"He's not around, though. We're the only ones close. There's no recent Work either, nothing that he might've left lingering. I'd sense it if there was. He wasn't here when you saw him, Pan.

"Maybe close?" The question is for the priest.

"We could go look," the suggestion is for Jim, but it is tentative. Her gaze cuts toward the cabin, alert. Wordlessly conveying that she does not want to leave Leah alone. " - see if we could find where he was and what we can learn."

Pan

We could go look.

That's as far as she gets with that idea. The suggestion is for Jim but Pan is the one who says "No," his tone sparking sharp-bright like stone slammed against stone.

Sid

Sid doesn't come any closer to the duo, the priest and the partier. She hangs back, always, arms wrapped around herself, clinging to the shadows. Like distance will somehow keep her safe from the terrible things they say. She's not that distant, though. Jim's there, close but not too close.

She frowns deeply at mention of droogs, her upper body shifting oh so slightly in a direction away from the one who said it though her feet stay planted like she's thrown down roots. That man, the one who took Leah and let them take her away from him, Pan says he's stronger than he is. Sid doesn't know how strong that is, but she remembers the warehouse. Closing her eyes, she sucks in a shaky breath, willing just one muscle to relax. Just one. Then maybe she won't seize up and die here.

We could go look, says Sera. Even as Pan is definitively telling them No, Sid's head comes up sharply. She startles at that tone, but she looks at Jim anyway, a wordless panic on her face.

Sera

Perception + Awareness-as-empathy

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 4, 4, 4, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Jim

"We're not going to go looking for trouble," first to Sid, his answer to that look. As much of a reassurance as he could muster.

Where Pan gives his answer, his decision, this isn't Jim's way. He continues, being very specific about that we:

"I won't. It's not my way. We win or we lose with who's in there. Not who's out there," first his own gesture, the shrug of his shoulder, his hand raising still gripping the t-shirt and shorts like a pom-pom and indicating the cabin, where Leah is inside, and then with that second part, out there, looking into the shadows that surround them. Trees and rocks and dirt and things living and dying like the were long before this cabin, new water, though not really new, because it all came from someplace old.

"Maybe they'll come. Maybe we'll have to protect her. From them. From herself. But I won't go looking to stir up death. That's what they're there for," continuing. And then, his thoughts jump again.

"Where's Jake?" Like they'd forgotten about him, or at least like he has. Leah, an Awakened, had come into the three of their lives, and Jake had gone home to whatever life remained, but that doesn't mean Jim's forgotten him. "Maybe we should bring him out here. He might still be... Mourning. It would be good for him too."

Yes, thought to thought, disjointed to some, but still... Others might see the connection. "It might be good for him to meet Leah. For Leah to meet him."

And then, back to Pan, like that rattled sidebar was only a pit stop.

"We need more than a No out of you. We all do," and it isn't judgmental. Hadn't he just agreed with Pan moments earlier? But it isn't even aggressive or angry. It just is. Much like Jim.

Pan

Exposure makes most people uncomfortable and this particular person never unbuttons his collar or leaves the house with his shirt untucked. His mind is not in an irreparable state but he is standing in front of a fire in the middle of nowhere with the night air lapping at his chest and midsection and his hair is mussed where his hand found it. He hasn't blinked much since he came walking out of the darkness so he sure as shit isn't looking too close to his right mind right now.

These people are not of his flock.They need more than a No out of him.

He starts to button his shirt and nods his head. Contrition has no place here and he is not contrite for he has no reason to be and Jim does not ask that of him. Still, he is solemn and silent as he rejoins the edges of his shirt. His hands don't shake.

"Leave it for tonight," he says. "Let the girl sleep, call Jake in the morning. Don't go looking for him. I went looking for him and he about bashed my brains in. We weren't even in the same town. Would've been pushing up daisies if Annie wasn't with me, you dig?"

At the binding of the last button he pinches the bridge of his nose. Puts both his hands on his hips. Considers the three of them and then considers the cabin.

"I think I'd better go lie down for a minute."

Sera

There's no way Sera can miss that wordless panic on Sid's face. This sharp spike of awareness and not-quite-guilt lances through her and she says, " - you can take the Jeep. If you need to split. If you feel like you need to get out of town for a few days," this is quiet and low and direct to the redhead. Sera gives a quick little shrug. "Dan and I just got a royalty check. I don't fucking need it. Dee doesn't charge us rent. I can spot you enough to lay low for a bit if that's what you feel like doing, too.

"But you should be okay in town."

Sera does not promise Sid that she will be okay here.

--

Then, the priest. Sera stands back while he buttons up his shirt, watches him as he pinches the bridge of his nose and tells them to Leave it for tonight. She has never seen him anything less than composed. She has never seem him anywhere but his right mind, and the look on his face worries her, wordlessly, physically. If there's any of Brogan's resonance still lingering around Pan from the confrontation, Sera can feel it and it is shivering-dark.

He tells them that he's going to go lie down for a minute. Sera does not really think about it, just wraps her left arm around him in a side-hug that turns into a real one if he allows it to. Tells him, steady and sure as she can, "You're okay. It's gonna be okay. We won't go looking tonight. I promise."

Then she lets him go. All at once and just as thoroughly as she embraced him.

"There's water in the fridge. Some Indian food, too. And apples," the quick cut of her half-smile is behind him. Only Jim and made Sid can see its razor ghost in the firelight.

She'll shadow his less-than-steady steps back toward the cabin until she's close to Jim. Gives him a sidelong look. This flashing smile, that is more haunted than joyful, but has both things twinned in it. It is lovely out here. The firelight and the smoke and the sky above them, spangled with stars that are bright points of awareness scattered all above them.

Sera does not want to go looking for Death either. But if it comes for them, she wants to be fucking ready.

"Called Jake the other day," she tells Jim quietly, when they're abreast. In this, they're on the same wavelength, because of course they are. "He's out of town, staying with family. I asked him to stay away for a while, I didn't want him caught up in all this. But if you think he might be good for her, maybe he can come back sooner."

Sera keeps shadowing Pan toward the cabin, then. She'll make sure he finds a bed and a bottle of water. A fucking apple or some goddamned thing. It's the least she can do.

Jim

Jim nods. As soon as he'd said it, even if it was an admonishment, he'd looked a bit contemplative of himself. Of why he'd decided to ask more of a man, even as Pan says he could have been dead instead of just bloodied.

He doesn't apologize, instead when Pan says he better go lie down he nods more than once. Moves forward to see if he needs help mounting the stairs. And if he doesn't? Holds out the shorts and t-shirt for him to take if he needs it. The latter might be a bit tight on the man, but it's the biggest Jim has and he want to give it.

"There's hot water for tea," and remembers his coffee, with whiskey in it.

Sera helps Pan to bed and Jim's attention returns back to Sid, as they are left alone at the edge of the light. In the darkness between the house and the fire. He looks toward the little blaze he'd started only minutes earlier. "It's nice by the fire." Then back on her. Well, not on her. Never really on her, not her face at least. But closer to her than he has before.

Because it's her or darkness and he does not want to look at the darkness.

Outside for a smoke.

Serafine

The neighborhood is a nice one. One and two story brickhouses on treelined streets. Mature trees well-tended over the years by upper middle class owners. Some of the homes have been overhauled extensively, others have been split into duplexes or even condo units. But most remain as they were: single family homes on city lots with modest yards and well-tended gardens and high garden walls.

The invitation by return of text was to a particular address on a particular street. Sid found Sera (wearing a hooded jacket) sitting on the front stoop there, and could feel the hum of her magic in the air around them. The low visceral song of it, physical and sensual and alive. Quiet yeah, but -

- enough to ensure that no strangers were following Sid. That no effects were hanging in the air around her. That Sid was intact and whole and under her own power and alone. That the sparks of life scattered up and down the quiet street had been augmented by just one: Sid's and no other.

Then Sera stood up from the stoop and started down the street. The address she'd texted Sid wasn't her own. She's paranoid enough after the events of recent nights that she's not putting that house number out into the ether. So they walked, two three four five six blocks through the quiet treelined streets, until they came to a nice two-story house in the middle of a quiet street with a double-lot and a stone garage hard against the alley bisecting the block.

Inside, the sort of chaos that belongs to a house with four twentysomethings, all of whom like to party and play music and take drugs and generally enjoy a lively social life of the sort that leaves not-much-time for housekeeping. Something about the space seems old and well-lived in, though; the detritus of the housemates lives has been scattered atop it. There's original canvases scattered around the hallways, not yet mounted to the wall. There's a giant sign with the numbers for all local cab companies just inside the front door. IF YOU DRANK MY BOOZE YOU DON'T DRIVE, the whiteboard on which the numbers are recorded says. There's even an old spring water bottle from some office water cooler labeled CAB FUND beneath the lovely mahogany table in the hallway.

Sera leads Sid through the wide open kitchen - renovated sometime in the last decade - where her house-mates who are also her band-mates are scattered. Offers her a drink from the fridge, then tells the rest that they are going outside to smoke. Which is code for: don't follow me. Dan's cool. Dee and Rick are just cool.

So Sera leads Sid onward.

Sid

It seems like ages since Sera sent out that text. She had information to share, the kind that could only be shared face to face. Sid had replied at the time, had messaged once after about those cameras she'd been seeking out around the city, then she, too, vanished. If messages had been sent her way in the in-between times, they would have gone unanswered. She doesn't really know why she responded to this one.

Maybe she's missed the woman. Probably not.

She parked her truck around the block from the address Sera gave her, and arrived early enough that she could perform a scan of her own. It takes her a long, long time to exert her Will over the area and see what can and cannot be seen by a sleeper's eye. But Sera isn't the only paranoid one on that block. Hasn't been for a few hours.

When Sid appears at last she's well aware of her surroundings. She's well aware that she's not being followed, that no one is noticing her trying not to be noticed - in her faded, falling apart clothes, an olive green cap pulled over her vibrant red hair and tugged as low as it can be tugged over her glasses. She keeps her head down and her hands in her pockets, but her eyes are constantly moving, constantly watching. She gives no sign she's noticed the Ecstatic sitting on the stoop. She gives the other woman a quick look when they meet up on that sidewalk, and she falls into step with her without a word.

They come to a house and Sid stops when it's clear this is the destination. She hesitates at the edge of the walkway, looking up at the building with a slight frown, but the hesitation only lasts a moment. That frown seems to be stuck there forever. Walking through the halls, she keeps her hands in her pockets and her shoulders hunched, and she sways to avoid knocking into things. It's done out of respect rather than fear of some sort of retribution for knocking into someone else's belongings, though who could tell with her. She's always so nervous. She's eyeing the roommates warily, even Dan, whom she shared a tiny room with for a few days. There's a twitch her head that is almost a nod, a kind of acknowledgement. Then they're going 'outside for a smoke.' Sid's brows tighten, a movement lost behind the brim of her hat but shows in her eyes. Saying nothing, she follows in Sera's wake like a kicked puppy.

Serafine

The garden is lovely. Bounded by a stone wall covered with moss and lichens. It is dark now and difficult to see, but here and there low lights brighten the garden's rich, dark shadows. Someone else tended it well and lovingly. Lately it is going a bit more to seed.

There's a stone patio away from the house, a scattering of chairs, a well-slung hammock, and one of those covered outdoor cabana beds, the rattan roof pulled back for a view of the sky. Ashtrays scattered all around out there; cigarette butts, the odd pipe tucked away, a modest hooka sitting on an old stone garden table in the center of the space. The scent of cigarettes inside the house was faint. This really is where Sera comes to smoke, saving the artwork inside from the constant exposure to tobacco smoke. Sera grabs a couple of beers and a bottle of water from the fridge on her way out, then a pack of cigarettes, and it is notable and remarkable how affectionate she is with her housemates. With Dahlia and Rick and particularly Dan, sliding an arm across his shoulders and dropping a kiss on the crown of his head when she slips past him to the fridge.

The trio, that trio, is playing a hard-fought game of stoned Scrabble. Extra points are awarded for using drug-slang. There is argument over whether ZA for pizza constitutes drug-slang when Sid and Sera sail through.

Outside, Sera sits down on the cabana bed. Cross-legged at the edge.

Lights up a cigarette and just looks at Sid, all alert and aware.

"Have a seat," on the bed, or anywhere. Sera pulls one of the ashtrays closer to her and opens one of the beers. Offers the other to Sid. "You been okay?"

Sid

Sid noticed the affection, the open closeness of Sera's bonds with these people. They don't just share a living space, not like Sid and her own roommate. Though, she's not entirely sure they merely share space anymore, either. Whatever is happening there, Sid doesn't like to think about it.

Sid doesn't like to think about a lot of things. She watched the easy, comfortable affectionate exchanges, the kiss to Dan's head, the touches, with a detached gaze. She is an outsider here, Jane Goodall among another branch of primates. No, that's not quite right. That does a disservice by Sera and Dan and their friends. But still, Sid feels alien inside that house. She feels a little better out in the garden, with the sky stretched out above them, stars twinkling through a thin veil of cloud. Out there it's open and not so close. Out there it's just the two of them.

She pauses once outside, just off the step, looking around at the tools of drug use, the cigarette butts, the moss and the lichens, all of it. All of it is taken in without sign of judgement or disdain. Sera's voice brings her back to the present, to the reason that she's here. To talk, catch up, exchange information, something like that. Sid looks around for a seat and takes one, not on the bed, but on the edge of a folding chair she adjusts so that she's mostly facing Sera straight on. Her eyes lower to the offered beer, but she gives a quick shake of her head. That gaze darts upward with the next question, alighting on Sera's face for a moment before shifting away and down. She doesn't know how to answer that, really.

So she nods her head, a hesitant lifting of her chin followed by a quick lowering. "You?"

Sera

"Not too bad," Serafíne returns, the flash of her smile in the darkness like heat lightning. Look: Sid sits on the edge of a folding chair. Sera sits crosslegged on the cabana bed, but then shifts her position, leaning back on her elbows, long legs curled beneath her. Faux-long legs, really. She just seems tall because of her body structure and addiction to heels and platform boots and tiny, tiny, tiny skirts. This is earlier: see. Pan has not yet attempted to scry the Fallen (or perhaps he already has; perhaps that is happening now and here is Sera, oblivious beneath the stars, beneath the canopy of the outdoor bed) and Sera has not yet had her encounter with John Brogan. Still, there is a sort of lie in the blithe response that lingers in the back of her voice, something alert and weighty about her countenance, her eyes gleaming in the dim light of the gathering evening as they glide over Sid, take in the redhead's body language, catch the quick little nod and move onward.

"The natives," a lift of her chin back toward the house, " - are getting restless, though. Been busy and keep skipping out on practices and gigs. If I keep this up I'll probably be homeless and they'll try to stuff Dan into one of my bustiers." There wasn't any real sign of that tension when Sid walked through the house, but the house was strange and full of strangers, entirely new, a country in which she does not speak the language.

"So, I've got some news, information really, but before I pass it on I wanna make sure you wanna hear it. You've as much right to it as anyone else, but I guess you've a right to keep on keeping your head down, too."

Sid

Not too bad, she says, and Sid is watching her, from the corner of her eye with her head angled down and away. She watches Sera and she listens to the night sounds of the neighborhood, and she's aware of noises from inside the house. She sits forward in her chair, her feet beneath her but spread far apart, and lifted to the balls of her feet, her hands tucked between the press of her knees. They are opposites. Sera wears tall shoes to increase her height and tiny, tiny, tiny skirts to increase the illusion of the length of her legs. Sid tries to make herself smaller, hunching her shoulders to be shorter, curving her spine and lowering her head to avoid notice.

It's quiet here, peaceful even. Two women chat in a walled in garden while the Wheel turns around them, setting things in motion far too quickly. It's before. Before Sid talks about death with Jim by firelight, tells him that she's not afraid, not of that. It's before the call from Justin, a call that starts to bring them all together, making the congregate because there's safety in numbers.

Right now, though, Sid is still avoidant. Or maybe she's not as much anymore. She's here now, after all. And Sera's talking about her band because it's okay to talk about things like that. It's okay to talk about life and such because the sense of danger is still a far off thing. The thought of Dan in a bustier almost, almost makes Sid smile. The change in her demeanor is almost too subtle to be seen, it can only be felt. Like the air around her has changed, a crackling energy has gone from electric to a heat haze. And then it fades right back again.

Sid tilts her head, just enough to look a little more directly at the woman laying back on the bed. If it weren't for the darkness or the hat, the worry that creeps onto her face would be more noticeable. Perhaps Sera already expects it, though. Most people consider it to be Sid's default state, and in a way they're not wrong.

"What...what is it?"

Sera

Sera reaches for the ashtray. Once of the ashtrays scattered around. There wasn't much smell of tobacco back in the house. Serafíne is a musician, not an artist, but she seems to accumulate art work the way other people do books. In trade for a gig or a song or a keg or a bag of weed, or maybe she pays cash. Somewhere in there is a frog she commissioned from the guy with the chainsaw in the backroads of North Carolina, because she wanted to see if he could make anything other than eagles and grizzlies emerge from the spent logs he carved and lo: he could. She has maybe a dozen large pieces and another dozen smaller ones. Canvases and collages and tapestries and whatnot. None of it is worth much, not in the eyes of collectors. She's not haunting high-end galleries, so much as accumulating bits and pieces of people she's met in bars and at festivals, at art walks and craft shows. Dynamic and alive, all of it.

So they don't smoke in the house, not much, not really, not unless it is late on a Friday night and morning's crawling around the corner and she's barefoot and there's snow on the stones and she's lazy and golden and not ready to move and wants just a bit of that burn int the back of her throat. The scent of tobacco isn't littered everywhere inside. But out here it has sunk into the hangings and the cushions and scattered itself around the flagstones. Sera is careful about where she leaves her filters but not everyone who wants through the home Sera shares with her bandmates is careful and there are crushed butts on the patio here and there, underfoot.

It's dark, though. So Sid can't see them.

That change in demeanor catches the edge of Sera's attention; the sharper view of her profile, all aslant, softened by the long fall of her (dyed) blond curls.

All Sid asks is What is it - and Sera's not looking directly at Sid anyone, has dropped her attention to a mahoghany box she'd left on the cabana bed. Which is clearly her stash: because now she's got a baggie open and is stuffing the bowl of a pipe with sticky buds. Dark enough that Sid could pretend it is tobacco but the scent is familiar, muskier and more herbal than tobacco ever is.

"Ever been to a chantry?"

The work of filling the pipe in the gathering dusk is enough to keep Sera's eyes off Sid. Or maybe there's another reason that direct look has fallen away from the redhead.

Sid

What comes out of the box doesn't surprise Sid in the last. Sera and Jim always seem to have something on them, some vice or another. Though she's never accepted offers to share, she's never appeared offended or put off by these things.

It wouldn't be my first trip she'd said in the motel room. Maybe, once upon another life, Sid tried those things. She looks away while Sera readies her pipe, reaching up to tuck her hair behind her ear, keeping that peripheral view open. Watching her, watching the ground, watching the house. Her hand returns to her lap to clasp together with its twin.

Her head moves while the rest of her stills at that question. A second later her eyes lift to watch Sera, to see her face which isn't turned toward her, then down to her hands, and finally away. Sid swallows hard before she answers.

"Yes."

Sera

There's a whole ritual here, and Serafíne takes her time with packing that pipe. Tamps down the buds with the edge of her lighter, allows them to settle, breathes in the familiar scent, considers whether there's room for more. All in the steady darkness of the twilit garden.

Sid is aware of her surroundings, keeps the ground, the house, the garden walls in view. The light from the kitchen spills outward, warm on close to the house, but they are far enough away that there's no echo of whatever conversation is happening inside.

Sera's leaning on one elbow now, the left one, holding the pipe with her left hand while she fills it with her right. Mostly her attention is still on her work, but a glance up at the hunched-over redhead from this position is enough to catch the stillness wreathing about Sid.

"Wanna go back to one?"

Sid

Sid's head lowers, her gaze firmly on her hands, pale and slim in the low light. With her hair out of the way, there's no hiding her expression, even in the darkness. Worried, tense. She feels exposed, and so she shifts her weight slightly, moves just a bit so that she's turned a little more away, giving Sera a fraction more of her profile. It doesn't help.

"No," she says, and tilts her head left before shaking it. "No, I don't think so."

Sera

Sera makes some noise in the back of her throat; quiet, reflective acknowledgment of Sid's response. Then judges her pipe adequately packed and tamped down and leans forward, shifting her long hair over her shoulder, to light the bowl with her lighter while drawing in a first deep lungful of smoke. That brief, bright strain as she holds it in, offers the pipe to Sid just in case she wants to take it, and finally exhales through the left corner of her mouth, all at once.

"The reason I ask is," she continues, voice a bit stripped from the smoke, but otherwise easy and conversational, as if they were talking about nail polish or their favorite designer or their favorite local coffee shop, "we know where it is now, and have sort of an open if probationary invite to stop by.

"There's a caretaker but otherwise everyone's gone. The caretaker says she's going to stay until she trusts us. Shoshannah's already living out there now, though I don't know if that's part-time or what. So."

A little shrug. Sera doesn't expect Sid to accept the pipe and doesn't take it amiss if the offer is refused. "I can take you out there sometime if you're interested. But if you're not, no one's gonna make you go."

The briefest pause, as her gaze shunts off. AWay from even approaching Sid's vicinity, back to the dark shadow of the house where it edges the garden, where the lights from the kitchen windows and sliding glass door cut through the gloom.

"Is that where you got hurt? A chantry somewhere?"

Sid

Her eyes flick toward Sera when she moves, and sees the woman's arm lifted, the pipe offered. A quick flick of her own head passes for a shake, a refusal. No, not this time.

They've found the chantry, the place that Shelby and her cabal guarded until they died. It's out there, and Shoshannah's already living there, maybe permanently, maybe not, which means it can't be all bad. It's not the badness that makes Sid shy away from the chantry, though, that one and all others. It's there and they're invited, but no one's gonna make her go, though. She almost relaxes.

Almost.

Sera looks away, then, pausing before asking a question that should be easy, should be okay. A week ago it would have been. Hell, four, five days ago it would have been. She would have asked and Sid would have said No, quietly but definitively, and it would have been no big deal. They would have a different conversation.

Tonight, though, that question hits her like a hammer. She thought she was okay, thought she could do this, she wanted to be here. When she saw Sera's number attached to that text, she remembered the hand resting on the carpet between them in that tiny motel room. She wanted to be near someone who had been kind to her, someone who didn't press too hard on old wounds. And hadn't Sera made that time spent cramped together with five other bodies a little more bearable?

Sid drags a ragged breath in through her clenched teeth. Her hands flex into fists atop her thighs, clenching so hard her arms start to shake.

It takes her a moment to try to brace herself, to get somewhere in the ballpark of "steady." When she finds her voice, it is low, and it is harsh, and it is pained.

"No."

Sera

"Shit." Sera's curse, quiet but forceful, is accompanied by another lungful of smoke. Hashish tonight, thick and redolent and stronger than most of the locally available strains of pot. It hangs sweet in the air around her as she exhales - and flops back down on the cabana bed. No longer looking at Sid but up at the sky through the opened canopy.

Down here, in the middle of the city, surrounded by security lights and porchlights, you cannot really see the stars, and its too early still for most of them to come out, but the sky is a sweeping and always-changing thing, even in the middle of a city.

"I never say the right thing, do I?" Wry, with that fine strain from the pot against her vocal chords.

"I swear to god, I'm not trying to - " but whatever that thought is, Sera arrests it. Breathes out, this long steadying breath that is, this time, not accompanied by a cloud of intoxicating smoke. The pipe is held carefully in her hand; there's a little lid to slide over the bowl, to cut off oxygen to the buds when she needs a break and she pushes that over the mouth with her thumb, thoughtlessly.

"Anyway. The chantry's out there. If you ever wanna go, Jim knows where. Shoshannah. The Padre, too. Remember him? Has a church down on Federal. You're think he'd be an asshole, being a priest and all, but he's pretty fucking chill.

"Hardly blinked an eye when I asked him if he wanted to make out in the confessional, first time we met." Pause, wry, " - well, maybe he blinked an eye. You ever been in a confessional? He was on the other fucking side so I couldn't see his face. Didn't call fire and brimstone down on me, though.

"Just asked if I wanted to go talk in private. So we did."

Sid

On the outside that's all there is to it. No, says Sid, a lot less simply than that. Her body is shaking where she sits, mostly in her arms. She doesn't explain, doesn't go on, doesn't say whether she meant No that's not where was hurt or No she doesn't want to talk about it or No both. She doesn't because she an't. Inside her head it's just Nonononononono on and on while Sera talks.

Sera flops back on the bed, her attention up at the sky and no longer on Sid, and she changes the subject. Changes it back, rather. To the chantry and who knows it. Sid barely even hears her, or what she hears doesn't make sense. Not until she lists off names, names of people familiar, people she...people who have become somehow important to her. Even Sera's voice, strained from the pot, is like a soothing balm to that old open wound. Jim she says, and the shaking starts to subside. Shoshannah is next, and that takes some more of the tension out of her body. Even The Padre, who she hardly knows beyond his connection to Shoshannah, relaxes her. She repeats them internally, using the names as a mantra, her eyes squeezed tight. Her chest expands and she's able to take in a lungful of air, sharp and quick and hard, like a drowning person whose head has finally breached the surface of the water. Panic subsides. Slowly, slowly, she unclenches her hands, first one and then the other. If her nails were longer there'd be blood on her palms, but there are only four little half-moon indentations pressed into her skin.

Sera is talking about the padre now. Sid only catches the end of it.

...in private. So we did.

Sid's breathing is still ragged, halting, but it's calming. And she's still here. She didn't run away. The realization is a little surprising.

Not looking over at Sera, she asks, "What?"

Sera

Serafíne seems entirely unphased by the thought that Sid missed any or all of her meandering reassurances and unstuck threads. She does lean up, forward, lifting her chin and canting her head so as to catch a glimpse of the redhead's profile in the darkness. The edge of the smile spreading across her mouth is fine though not sweet. Wry maybe. Sera spends half her life fucked up and misses so many threads. Given the detritus of drugs and alcohol out here on the patio, one may guess that many of her friends are the same; that the ever-widening circle of her acquaintance hinges, in some sense, on that willingness to get fucked up, that openness to alteration of consciousness. Or maybe: just enjoyment of a really great fucking part. The sort that lasts all night and well into the dawn.

"How much did you catch?" The question is as lazy as Sera's lean sprawl on the bed. She lays back down, the pipe sealed now, the smoldering bowl smothered inside. Just the faint whisp of smoke from the mouthpiece. One arm cushioning her head, the other drifting off the bed, holding the pipe with a sort of negligant familiarity.

So Sera repeats herself. Tells Sid that the chantry's there if she ever wants to go. Tells her that all those people: Jim and Shoshannah and Pan know where it is, if she ever wants to go. That whole story about Pan gets sort of repeated too, though this time with some pot-related expansion. Oh, Sid gets some sense of the back and forth of the whole exchange, then. Sera waxes poetic on these points: how she wandered into the church, where the abuelitas were lighting candles (and in the single word, abuelita, Sid can hear some sense of Sera's Spanish, which was learned at her mother's knee and not in school, for all that Serafíne otherwise seems as American and as fucking white as anyone Sid might know) and there was that resonance coming from the fucking confessional. The looks the abuelitas gave her, crossing themselves and gossiping low as they studied her covertly. Oh, they thought they were studying her covertly, but Sera knows what it feels like when eyes are on her.

"So I'm like, Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been three thousand seven hundred eighty-three days fourteen hours, and twenty-two minutes since my last confession. I said, I hope your ass has a comfy fucking cushion, 'cos this is gonna take a while. And he laughed, I could hear it, but he went through that whole confession rigamarole, right? Bless your mind and your fucking mouth, that bit.

"And I was like, fuck. I forgot. I don't believe in sin. Asked him to make out.

"He took it pretty fucking well, all things considered. He's good people.

"Oh, so anyway. Annie, she owned the place with her brother, she came and found Pan. Said we could come out on a sort of trial basis. So if you ever get the hankering, you let one of us know.

"Fuck." Abruptly shifting her hips on the bed, digging something out of her pocket. "She gave me this to give you."

In her hand, a little leather pouch. Sid might feel the resonance emanating from the pouch (unbreakable) and it is not Sera's own.

Sid

Sid has been invited to that kind of party, the first night she met Sera. It was practically her farewell, or maybe it was her way of saying goodbye. But this is the first time Sid has come to this house, and by all appearance she has no interest in getting fucked up or enjoying a really great fucking party, at least not anymore.

Sera asks how much she caught, and Sid tells her, quietly, "Just...just the end." As Sera repeats herself, expanding on bits here and there, she relaxes a little more, but, she realizes, only so far. She is still tense, the muscles of her shoulders so tight and drawn they ache clear up to the back of her skull. She tries to shrug one, tries to loosen them, but the result is a tight cramping feeling, which is so much worse than before. So, while Sera talks about the church, the kind of place she remembers the Ecstatic used to go before, until she was kicked out for making out with a girl. It was part of the night time confessionals of the motel room. Sid didn't participate.

While Sera is talking now, Sid lifts her hand to her mouth, to gnaw nervously on her thumbnail. Her eyes are on Sera, on her lazily outstretched arm, on the pipe held in her fingers. Hesitantly, she starts to rise but stops. Rises a little more, but stops again. In this way, shoulders hunched, spine still curved, knees bent, she slips across the distance between the chair and the bed. Doesn't get on it, no, but she crouches down. Sera can feel her presence, can maybe even feel the warmth of her.

Whatever she had intended to do by coming closer, the attempt is momentarily thwarted when Sera moves, shifting her weight to dig into her pocket. Sid rocks back a little, puts her hand on the edge of the bed to keep her balance. She stares down at the little pouch in Sera's hand, and she frowns at it.

"What is it?"

Sera

Sera's attention curves lazily in Sid's direction as the Orphan starts to rise from the chair. Just that sense of blind awareness from the creature sprawled out there, the movement of her head no more intentional or deliberate than the movement of a morning glory to follow the face of the sun. Reaches across her body and drops the little leather pouch on the edge of the bed where Sid can reach it. There's a strange, bitter, herbal smell coming from it.

And that unfamiliar resonance.

"Healing charm," Sera supplies, low-voiced. "Annie's a Verbena. If you're ever injured, you just eat it. It'll heal - well, pretty much anything.

"Way better than a fucking hospital. She made one for all of us."

Sid

The pouch is dropped on the edge of the bed, and Sid continues to stare at it warily, as though it were a living, potentially poisonous thing. Healing charm, Sera says, and that wary look deepens a little, almost becomes suspicious. The hand that reaches out to take it from the bed shakes a little - it's not that easy to push through that panic, Sid's Will isn't that strong. But take it she does. The hand that grips the edge of the bed tightens as she leans her weight back, lowering herself to sit on the ground. Carefully. Her eyes dart one final time to the pipe in Sera's hand and its stress relieving properties, but she looks down at the thing in her hand instead. She lets go of the bed. Resting her elbows on her upraised knees, she studies the bag. She feels that unfamiliar resonance, which must belong to that person named Annie.

"Why," she says, stopping in the middle of the cadence of a more complete inquiry. Shakes her head. "Thanks. Tell her...tell her thanks for me. If you see her."

Sera

"Because," a wry look. Sera's watching Sid now though it is a sidelong thing; not precisely sly but see - the edge of her profile, the lean line of her body, one foot propped up on the cushion, that knee raised, the other curled beneath. The pipe in one hand and the other, well. Now that the healing charm has been delivered Sera tucks it back beneath her head as a pillow. Long hair snakes out around her head but Sid is on Sera's right and has a better view of the shaved strip there. "Things are dangerous. We're supposed to stick together or they'll tear us apart. And she doesn't want any of our kind, on our side of this whole fucking thing, whatever the hell it is, to get hurt.

"If you need to use it, take it out of the pouch and eat it. It'll taste like shit, but - " Sera has noticed that glance of Sid's toward the pipe, maybe, or maybe she's just in the habit of offering regularly to share whatever she has that anyone else may want. A tip of her hand in casual offer, easily taken and easily refused, toward the redhead now seated on the ground.

The flagstone is cool but not damp, there's a different view from the level Sid has taken, though not much improved. Still, the edge of the bed like the horizon and Sera reclining against that horizon line like a line of hazily seen mountains in the distance. Or maybe that was what Sid would see if she were tripping right now. Sera's lazy smile is mostly lost in the darkness, but it's there.

"We found Leah. The girl from the warehouse. Jim's taking care of her now. At this cabin out in the mountains."

Sid

Her expression tightens for half a second at Sera's answer to that aborted Why. That wasn't quite the question she started to ask and then rethought, but it's close enough. It's dangerous to go alone, she thinks, and she would almost smile at the thought, if only others didn't crowd it out.

Good ones.

Bad ones.

Worse ones. Ones she stamps down and pushes back, because if she doesn't she'll lose it. Already she can feel her muscles clenching.

We're supposed to stick together or they'll tear us apart.

Sid frowns, wraps her arms around her legs and lowers her chin toward her knees. She doesn't want to stick together. She wants to stay apart, it's...it's not safer, but it's better. There's less chance of being noticed if they're not all grouped together. They present less of a solid target. This is before she gets that call from Justin. She'll change her mind then, but here and now she still wants to stay separate.

The hand that lifts to run through her hair is shaking, and is stopped by the hat she wears. Sid removes it, lets her knees drop to the sides and forces herself to sit up a little straighter. The muscles in her shoulders scream at her. When the pipe is offered again, Sid looks at it, lips pressed together, brow furrowed, but only for a moment. This time it is not refused. This time, she reaches out with trembling fingers to accept it. She holds it for a moment, studies it between thumb and forefinger. Then, twisting a little, shifting her weight over to one buttock, she slips the charm into her pocket before settling again. She looks for all the world like someone about to try swimming for the first time. Inhaling deeply, exhaling quickly, she takes the plunge.

Her shaking fingers make her fumble, but that doesn't disguise the fact that she knows what she's doing. At least she doesn't have to wait for Sera to show her how to open the bowl. She doesn't check to make sure she's doing it right before she inhales that pungent smoke, holds it in her lungs for a beat, and lets it out again.

"You did?" she asks, her voice tight as she passes the pipe back. Shifting her weight a little, she leans her back into the edge of the bed, and waits for the buzz to kick in.

Sera

"Yeah," when Sid takes the offered pipe, Sera tosses her the plastic lighter too, just in case the embers have been fully extinguished already. Tucks her now empty right hand across her stomach, long fingers dappled idly over her old cotton t-shirt. "The day after we left the hotel. The Padre scried her for me, and we hooked up with Jim and found her.

"Do you know what Fallen are? Sometimes they're called Nephandi."

Sid

If Sera doesn't take back the pipe, then Sid keeps it. She closes it up, the lighter held in the closed fingers of her left hand, she holds the pipe between her thumbs and forefingers. She needs something to do with her hands, something that will keep her from resting them on the ground and finding any cracks in the flagstones. And, she needs something to focus on so that the other thoughts recede, and with them the tension. She has no intention of taking another hit, at least not yet.

Talking about Leah doesn't much help. Sid knows that it wasn't the girl's fault all those people died. The deaths were an accident, a result of her Awakening, but still. That kind of power, uncontrolled, and near the padre, who has been okay if a little frightening, and Jim, who took her to DMNS that time. She still owes him for that day, she needs to pay him back. When she'll be able to do that she has no idea.

Turning the pipe over in her hands, she leans her head back so that she looks at it through lowered lids.

Sera asks if she knows what Nephandi are.

Sid frowns, but nods her head.

Sera

The story about Leah will not help Sid calm down, but Sera has passed the point of no return with it. There's more. And Sera tells it, in a quiet and quietly impassioned voice: she and Jim scried Leah's future. The girl was going to kill herself, to jump from the top of a tall building, a hospital. We could see the lights, says Sera, for the helicopter pad. But as she jumped, someone jumped after her, someone cloaked and hooded who caught her and floated gently to the ground, then removed the memory of his deeds from the minds of the witnesses. Someone powerful. Someone dark.

Three someones, watching her. The man from Sera's first dark and bleak vision, and two others, one cloaked, one with maddened eyes.

Jim and Sera say a half-dozen, a dozen, a half-hundred potential outcomes where, with Pan, they confronted this dark trio on the roof of that hospital. Each disastrous in its own way. So Sera suggested that they reach out to Leah, make a connection with her mind and show her that hope was possible, that she could make a choice to turn against the darkness inside her.

Oh, Sid cannot know what Sera means when she says this; how strongly she identified with Leah, the dark things from her own past that inspired her above and beyond mere compassion to search for and find the girl at the center of it all.

Between them: Jim and Sera and Pan, they made they appeal - to hope and the promise of new beginnings, and the girl, lost in self-hatred and self-doubt and guilt, soaked in the resonance of death, opened up to them just long enough that she started to hope.

Then they felt Him behind them. The man from her dream, stronger even than Pan and Jim, Sera shares. He invaded their linked minds as easily as a shark cuts through still ocean waters, but - let them go if they promised not to hurt Leah.

Sera shudders when she mentions John Brogan, when she describes him, this stark motion of her small frame on the cabana bed. She does not say: that he smiled at her. But she describes him, thoroughly, both Brogan and the other male they saw, so that Sid will know what he looks like should she ever see him.

Sid

It's true, the story doesn't help with Sid's attempts to relax. Her muscles are still painfully tight despite the drug entering her system. And still she doesn't take another breath. She turns the pipe in her fingers, over and over, and as she does she breathes in slowly. Holds it. Releases it slowly. Despite the terrible content of what she says, she lets Sera's voice wash over her, using the cadence, the timbre, the resonance, as an almost lullabye.

It works, a little. Tilting her head to the side, she feels herself slowing down.

Belatedly, her brain processes the information. The scrying, the visions, the trio on a rooftop, the figure that fell after Leah, or would have. Later, she'll hear Jim and Pan and Sera talking about a Him and his droogs. Later still, she'll realize they mean this John Brogan and these henchmen of his. That's later.

In the now, silence falls over the garden for a short while, but not too long.

Sid frowns suddenly, her nose wrinkling. Freeing a hand from the pipe, she scratches the back of her neck.

"Why would he do that? Why would he just let you take her like that?"

Sera

The narrowest of shrugs expresses itself upward on the bed. Sera's head lolls to the side and her eyes find Sid, sitting there, turning the pipe around and around in her hands. That's hashish they're smoking, not pot, and while it's good stuff, stronger than any marijuana available, all concentrated residue, one hit is not enough to do much beyond relaxing that leading edge of tension, Sera knows. But she says nothing, just watches the Orphan from beneath half-lidded eyes, then looks back up to the sky.

"No clue. Maybe he was thought that she really might kill herself. Maybe he didn't want to fight with her there because it might push her over the edge. Maybe he thinks she's - "

A sharp breath out.

"I can't imagine living through what she's living through, Sid. I thought I could, but I can't. She had parents like all the rest of us. Never talks about her real mom and there was tension with her folks, but she had a couple of brothers. A fucking dog she loved.

"Plays Settlers of Catan like a fucking dervish and has no interest whatsoever in the giant bag of goodies I brought her from Ulta.

"But what's inside her, sometimes she says she can't smell anything but death. I can't imagine living with anything like that. That awareness. That fucking darkness. That pain," and yet, this vibrant string of imaginative sympathy there. For Leah? for Sid? for herself? Well, perhaps she can imagine it then, some miserly portion of it, " - can you?"

The question is rhetorical, that much is clear. Sera is not looking at Sid, does not expect a response. Is laying there looking at the stars, but: if Sid wants to take the opening, well.

"Anyway, Jim's doing what he can for her. I guess we all are, though I don't really know what happens next."

Sid

No clue, she says, and Sid turns her head then, tilts it if she has to in order to find Sera's face on the bed. There's confusion on her own, because she can't imagine that. That man had that girl and he let Jim and Pan and Sera have her and no one asked him, Why?

If Sid had all of the variables, if she knew more about what it means to be widderslainte she might be able to posit a hypothesis. But she doesn't, so she can't. She just sits there, twisting the pipe between her fingers, the lighter wrapped in her fingers warm from the heat of her hand.

Destiny, said the man in the park, the memory lifting to the surface of her mind unbidden. There's a connection there, and Sid, just on the outside edge of a high, can't figure it out.

And anyway, Sera's talking about Leah. Leah who had parents like the rest of us, and maybe she did. Leah who plays Settlers like a dervish and sometimes smells nothing but death. A question is asked, a rhetorical one Sid isn't meant to answer. She could, of course, but like in the hotel, she doesn't know what to say, so she sticks with what she knows, and what she knows is silence.

She turns her head away, looks down at the pipe in her hands and frowns at it like she can't quite figure out how it got there in her hands, even though she knows.

What happens next. They've got a girl who smells death, who lives with pain, under their care - theirs, not Sid's - who was taken away from a dead cabal only to be handed over without a word to a loosely affiliated bundle of Awakened. What do you do with that?

Her head lifts suddenly, and she looks over at Sera.

"Had. You said she had."

Sera

"It's not like she can go back," the edge of her attention cutting back down to Sid, seated on the ground. The subtle gleam in her eyes, which are dark in the shadows of the garden, and only dark.

An ache in Serafíne's voice too - quiet and raw from the hashish or memory, the fucking drive to believe in things of-this-world and the people who belong to it, some shadow of the past surfacing or just a sort of sub-lingual and liminal empathy that is live and utterly physical in her, embedded into the matrix of sinew and viscera and sparking nerves that make up her corpus. - an ache there.

"They're lost to her. Even if she gets through this - and god, we're trying to help her through this. Give her a chance to be what she wants to be rather than what she was fated to become. But even if she gets through this, Sid, she can't go home again. Some doors close behind you and they're closed forever.

"Poor kid."

Sid

Sera looks back at her and Sid automatically looks away. The way she reaches up to free her hair from behind her hair, allowing it to fall like a curtain to shutter her face, it's reflexive, almost an instinct. There's an ache to Sera's voice, a strain from hash or from the topic of their conversation and the feelings, the emotions it evokes in her, and Sid avoids it.

And she closes her eyes. And she breathes.

She doesn't ask her what happens if they can't get her through this, if Leah can't fight off the darkness that rises up inside her, the thing that drove her to the fucking roof of a hospital. The girl will be lost. To darkness, to mayhem, to death or Death. She doesn't want to hear the details, the possibilities, the endgame scenarios that Jim and Sera may or may not have scried.

Right now she doesn't want to think at all. But she knows that smoking any more is a Bad Idea, so she makes sure the pipe is out, and she sets both it and the lighter down on the edge of the bed or hands them back to Sera, whichever is easier. Still keeping her head down and her face half-hidden.

Sera

After that, Serafíne falls quiet. Takes back the pipe and the lighter and takes another hit or two or three. Just laying there looking up at whatever stars are visible through the haze of the city's light pollution. The sounds of the neighborhood open up around them and Sera looks like she has or is on the verge of falling asleep. Lights a clove cigarette and smokes it, dreamily, then (at some point) curses quietly under her breath.

"I can't drive like this. Fuck."

Quiet.

Then, what will turn out for Sid to be a fateful request,

" - hey. I've got supplies to take out to Jim at the cabin. Be my designated driver, would you?"

And the rest, as they say, is history.

One Saturday Morning.

Fr. Echeverría

"I'm just going across the room. Drink your water."

When he stands from his crouch it's slowly and with no small amount of stiffness in his back and knees but he does not complain. In a small umbilicus between the living room and the bedroom he opens a closet and pulls out the extra bedding he keeps for situations like this. There's an entire studio apartment upstairs for situations like this but that's where married clergy would normally keep their families. He's not married. He just attracts strays.

The door clicks shut and he comes back with a pillow and a blanket. Does he think he could see.

"I don't know," he says. Parks the pillow at one arm and folds the blanket over the other. "We're gonna talk more in the morning. Finish your water."

Minor ministrations before he goes back to bed: he locks the front door and picks up the baseball bat and puts the things that fell on the floor into the sink. Closes the refrigerator door. Goes back into the bedroom and gets between the sheets and lies still. He's asleep and snoring lightly within minutes.

-----

Dawn comes like it always does and the day promises to be bright but not overly warm. He rises before she does and when she wakes up he's showered and dressed and is sitting in the kitchen drinking a glass of orange juice. A newspaper lies spread across the table and he watches her through the archway between the kitchen and the living room like he's not entirely convinced she's straightened out yet.

Serafíne

He's right. She hasn't straightened out yet. Not wholly. Sure the body gets used to psychedelics, but that just means you take more. Despite the pillow and the blanket and the admonition to sleep, Serafíne slept very little last night. She was tripping, but something in that chaotic interlude between the point where her trip went bad and the point where he settled her on the couch it went back to being okay again.

When he returned with the blanket and pillow, parked one close to her and the other at the other end of the couch, she reached up for him, with both hands, to give him a deeply inhaled smile, but full of a sudden physical contentment, and a backwards hug. Told him, "I don't know how you got in my house," the smile widened, and her dilated gaze fell away. "But I'm glad you're here."

She didn't let him go, but she was as easy to maneuver as she had been the last few moments; he unwound himself from the tangle of her arms, saw to the minor ministrations before bed. Finds in his kitchen not merely the things she dumped from his fridge, but her phone on the counter, a tube of lipstick rolling around on the floor, and a black studded leather clutch in his crisper drawer.

---

So she spent the night tripping, mostly quiet, on his couch. Tripping and drunk, which may have been the problem. With her senses mostly back and his resonance everywhere, the trip ended as something much bright than it began. The walls stripped themselves to the studs and the studs became slender aspens white and brilliant against a black night sky, and the ceiling peeled itself back and the stars slipped down like rain onto her face. Like fire into her skin.

She was just quiet, while this endless parade of illuminated night just presented itself to her. Crawling across the sky and kneeling down and moving onwards, with what would become a slipping majestic certainty, and the only thing to frighten her were in the dark places, between. Hard not to Work when the world is opening itself to you, and so she did. Pulled herself into the ether and pushes her senses outward. Seeking nothing, just feeling the pulse of life all around her like the sparks of errant fireflies in her periphery.

--

Fell asleep like that near dawn and wakes up like that, now, too. All discombobulated. Though she never managed to peel the dress off her body, the hem has risen up to her ribs, the base of her sternum. Slips out of the tangle of the blanket (at some point, two of her garters have come un-snapped and so the stocking on her left leg sags like a knee-high sock with nothing to keep it up) and pads past the archway and further to his bathroom. Showers, taking rather too long for someone who isn't washing her hair, but she isn't washing her fucking hair, just her face and body.

When she emerges again, her face is scrubbed clean. Her cheeks are distended like a chipmunk's because she's swishing his Listerine. Her stockings are gone and she's wearing just the dress now, barefoot on the worn linoleum. Hair damp but not wet, and she's braided it a bit, pulling it away from the buzz cut in a manner that accentuates the shaved-in line.

Sera brushes past the kitchen table and lays a hand on Pan's shoulder as she passes. The contact is brief, a wordless sort of thanks or apology, though the gory details of the night have been mostly devoured, she remembers some of it. The darkness that swallowed the sliding glass doors, the familiar view of the back garden, the gazebo with its cabana bed and the roses Dee's grandmother grew. Then came pushing onwards. That's what it seemed like.

So, a hand on his shoulder in passing, the brush of her body close behind his chair, because that's how she fucking is in the morning, and then she's passed him, and spits out her Listerine in the sink.

Then pours herself her own glass of OJ. Time to start replacing all those vitamins she's stripped out of her body yet again.

Fr. Echeverría

No lecture or verbal expression of disapproval or disappointment greets Sera when she walks into the kitchen. He glances up from the article he's reading when her hand passes over his shoulder. Listerine blocks words so he waits until she's spat and moved to the refrigerator before he folds up the newspaper to put it out of his mind.

For the awakening he had last night Pan does not look exhausted or put-out this morning. Thus far his Saturday is trundling along in the standard tradition of previous Saturdays with the exception that he has not gone out to run errands this morning. A day of rest finds itself into the week by planning or providence. He'll wander across the street to read and pray and do whatever else he does in the afternoons when the afternoon comes.

Now he takes a swallow of orange juice and is thankful in silence that Sera does not appear to be hurt. She finds her clutch and her lipstick and her phone stacked neatly in a cluster on the counter by the fridge. He has not examined any of them, just rescued them from abandonment and put them where she can find them now.

"This is a nice place you got, here," he says. Thinks he's being funny.

Serafíne

Sera still has a stamp on the back of her left hand from the last bar she went to last night. The wrist band from the one before that came off in the struggle last night, drifted to the floor and Pan picked it up on his way down the hall this morning or maybe even last night. Threw it away. Sera pours her OJ and finds her things stacked by the fridge. Glances at the lipstick and then opens the clutch by its crystal-laden skull clasp, makes a noise and tosses it inside. God knows what she keeps in there. It doesn't even look like her phone would fit.

Maybe he is being funny because she gives him a glance and breathes out a noise that sounds like a laugh. Lifts her eyes to the ceiling does this searching sort of glance around the walls of the room, like she's considering it all.

"Thanks." Her mouth curves as her eyes drop back down to the priest and his fucking orange juice and his neatly folded paper. "It's not bad," she allows. Playing along or some fucking thing. Maybe she does like it, though, all filled up with light. "I've had worse digs."

She doesn't remember exactly how she ended up here, or why, though she could look back and see if it mattered, tug on the niggling little threads of her trip that are still sparking around the edges of her vision and hunt down the truth, she doesn't. Just takes a long drink from her glass of OJ and sets it down on the counter by her waist, and the edge of the black line work on her tattooed palm catches her attention.

The shark and the fucking scissors. Christ.

"I'm - " here she looks up. Finds him at the table again. " - sorry." Seems like she means it, too, in the morning light. Takes in a deep breath and looks like she's going to continue that apology with another I statement, but shakes it off before its fully born. Twists her expressive mouth, all rue, and is already reaching for her phone. "Gonna call a cab and get out of your hair."

Fr. Echeverría

"You're not in my hair."

She has her own place and her own day but it's not as if he wants her gone. It isn't a compulsion to stay, either. He awoke to the sound of her clomping high heels in his kitchen and that was where he found her and he did not judge her for this. Did not pray over her while she brandished the bourbon or sprinkle her with holy water while she slept.

Old as he is and worn as he is that was not the worst or most impressive display of divorce from reality that he had ever witnessed. But they don't talk about this. She can tell he wants to talk because he does that thing he does where he ignores whatever he was doing before she showed up even though he has about a dozen other things clattering around in the background waiting for him to come back to them.

While she calls the cab Pan stands from the table and takes his glass to the sink. He has no dishwasher. The glass is drained and he washes it by hand and sets it into a small dry rack. After the call he turns from the sink and sets his hands against the edge of the porcelain.

It's worth mentioning that the priest has not referred to Leah by her given name once this entire time. He does not hesitate before saying 'the girl' but anyone paying attention to his face can tell he has to really gear himself up to give her that much.

"Have you felt him watching you since the night we picked up the girl?" he asks.

Serafíne

He says she's not in his hair.

She is thumbing the phone on, the gesture casual, scrolling through the messages that have gone unanswered. Leaning back against the edge of his counter beside the fridge, her eyes on the screen but sometimes flicking up at him. Gives him a look like she doesn't believe him, but she has to, doesn't she?

So it's not a cab she calls, not yet. Just a few messages she returns, texting back the original authors the briefest code to their fucking 911 where the fuck r u? messages. A-OK. Back later. Checking in so they know she's neither dead nor kidnapped.

She scrolls through a few more messages that she does not bother to answer, then glances up as he turns away from the sink and leans back against the edge. There's something pensive about her expression. Tongue between her lips, eyes dark from the still-dilated pupils searching him.

Then shakes her head no. "I haven't," glancing down and aslant from him, at his shadow on the linoleum, his kitchen chair just askew from where he's vacated it. A little shrug, but enough to make the hem of her dangerously short dress rise and fall to near the apex of her thighs. Her mouth a twist of rue. "I'm just being paranoid.

"I'd tell you if I did. You or Jim." She breathes out, sharply, all at once, "Wouldn't keep that from you." then reaches for the glass of OJ on the counter beside her.

Takes another sip of the orange juice, and holds it in her hand, turning it in a slow circle, watching the light gleam against the pulp suspended in the liquid, mesmerized by the chatoyent glow on the surface, and asks, "Did you ever black out?" Looks back up at him then,level across the interval distance. "You know, before all this priest stuff?"

Back in the bad old days.

Fr. Echeverría

His eyebrows flick at the news of her being paranoid. It doesn't come as a surprise. She came close to smashing a liquor bottle on his head last night because she thought he had snuck into her house. This isn't her house but he knew enough not to say that at the time. Didn't argue with her when she thought he had gotten inside of her head. Didn't do much arguing at all beyond telling her she was safe.

None of them are truly safe but they're not in active danger either. The distinction is a fine one and they don't dwell on it.

And he watches her for signs of the hallucinogenic's lingering in her system. Does not move from where he's come to stand. His broad shoulders shade the sunlight bled in through the windows but it shines through his hair. He never looks as old as he is until he stands in the light and then he looks older than the forty-something years he boasts.

This priest stuff makes him laugh and the laugh shaves off some age. Back in the bad old days he was probably a very handsome young man. Very handsome young man tend to make very bad personal choices.

"Yes," he says. "More than once."

Serafíne

His laughter calls out the edge of her smile. The sudden razor-brilliant edge that makes her seem so very, very bright. So exquisitely alive. Pulls her eyes back to him too, unstintingly direct. This hungry sort of awareness crawls over her when his laughter rings.

Oh, but her expression sobers.

"Did you ever wake up afterward, knowing that you'd done something bad, something really fucked up, with no idea what it was you did.

"Just that feeling. Just that knowledge down in your gut."

She's not talking about last night.

Fr. Echeverría

A time to laugh is followed quickly by a time to sober up and talk about the things they can't remember.

To walk into a room full of strangers with little more than the clothes on your back to show for the road to that point is one thing. You walk into an anonymous meeting and you get your cup of weak-ass instant coffee and you sit down. Long time ago you could smoke inside and nobody gave a shit but these days you have to go outside. At meetings you can tell the entire room things you wouldn't tell your oldest friend because you can walk out of those places.

He can't walk out of this kitchen. Isn't technically his kitchen. But for the grace of God and the congregation he stays here. Rosa doesn't say this in so many words but they've been colleagues so long Rosa doesn't even have to say something for Pan to get the message that she doesn't approve and she don't think God would approve neither.

"Most addicts do, at some point." A beat. "Why?"

Serafíne

If he's looking for signs of the hallucinogen still in her system, he can find them. Her pupils are twice as large as they might normally be, particularly for his kitchen, with the morning light pouring in through the window over the sink behind him. Then there's the tension in her muscles, slipping into a sort of fuck-me lassitude. The way she moves, so carefully, turning her head to espy the OJ she has set aside before directing her hand to reach for it, like she's pulling on threads - or being pulled by threads - connected to a larger, wholly ineffable tapestry.

And if he knows the half-life of drugs like the ones she took last night, he might be able to guess that she didn't sleep on his couch, so much as drift in a waking dream. He might guess that she has another hour or two or even three, if she's lucky, of this slow, down-ramping activity, before she crashes and sleeps for twelve hours.

Of course, men like him don't get into the same kinds of drugs that pretty little white girls like her do. At least, not the same kinds of drugs the same ways. Pretty little rich white girls, because that's what she is. He has no fucking idea that that black studded leather clutch she threw in with his apples and his wilted iceberg lettuce cost more than a grand.

Little wonder that Rosa does not approve.

Then there's the way she looks at him, as she's doing now. It's not so much an I want to fuck you look, which happens only in pornos, which are made for men, or at last call in a fucking nightclub, but an I think you're nifty sort of look. Of course, for girls like her I think you're nifty almost invariably leads to other, more intense places, and that's something Rosa is a helluva lot more likely to understand than the Padre.

See, when he laughed like that, the look shifted into something like I think you're nifty enough to walk across the worn linoleum of a sun-warmed kitchen on a Saturday morning on bare feet and - - but now that look's gone; or at least, subsided, subsumed, slipped beneath her skin.

Her eyes meet his in that beat between his admission and his question, then cut physically away. Her body is languid, hips forward, hands back, one loose around the base of her glass of OJ. There's a bruise on her left thigh and another on her right shin, maybe from her struggle with him last night, self-inflicted, but nothing that won't quickly fade and heal in a couple-three days.

"So. I have something like that." She finds his eyes again and favors him with a twinge of a smile. There's no joy in it. "And I'm pretty sure it involved someone like him."

Fr. Echeverría

Rosa understands far more about girls than the parish's pastor is ever going to understand. She was one, she raised more than one, and she's around them from the time she arrives at the church in the morning until the time the last service trundles out the door at night. Some evenings she sits on the rectory porch with Pan and they split a beer and talk. No evenings like that have happened since the young lady with the aura like a shiver started living upstairs in his studio. They haven't happened since that parrandera started hanging around.

(She'll ask him this morning as he stands in the office flicking through the mail after morning Mass. She thinks he's having an affair. It isn't any of her business whether he's having sex with someone outside the parish but she'll make it her business. She's known him since she was his business.

Now her life is clean and she has a relationship with her daughters now that her life is clean and she thanks the Lord for it but the Lord wasn't the one who tracked her down and pulled her out of a shooting gallery when she stopped coming to NA meetings over ten years ago. That was Pan.

Pan doesn't know that Rosa once thought she was in love with him. That's why she worries about him.)

And that parrandera stands in his kitchen looking at him in a way he does not see. He's focused on what's driving her to behave the way that she is and it has nothing to do with it. It has to do with the blank spaces in her own history.

He doesn't waver under her gaze. Makes eye contact and is unashamed of it. His own are kind though he does not return the smile.

"You thought about looking into it?" he asks.

Serafíne

Sera breathes out, this sharp breath that flares her nostrils. He does not waver under her gaze, but perhaps she wavers under his. Look at the way her own eyes drop from his, down the dark bulk of his black-clad frame, and away. Just off her her left.

That smile disappears and she seals her lips, presses them together so they virtually disappear. Brings her hand to her mouth, rubs her thumb over her jaw, then her mouth. The way someone would do while remembering a kiss, the movement of another mouth upon their own.

There are so many pieces of it she hasn't told him. Just the sparest details, the Cliff's Notes version. The analogy. The I have something like that too and its a confession without a confession. Maybe he can read that in her now, her reluctance to be defined by what she lacks, instead of what she's built for herself beyond that. The level of fucking trust it took for her to broach the subject with a near stranger, a fucking priest. Maybe she remembers the way he hugged her, and murmured, into her hair, into her neck that she was fine, that she was okay, that she was safe.

"I suppose it depends on, what you mean by looking into it." Here she cuts her eyes back to his and finds them still on her, steady and unshamed and also unshaming, but so direct it makes her feel naked before him. A sharply exhaled breath follows, and she opens her mouth, takes the knuckle of index finger into her mouth, and worries it with her teeth. "I guess not, though."

This is the only untruth she tells him: she has done so much work reconstructing her past, pulling concrete memories out of some dark fucking ether. Turning herself back into a person with a name and a purpose and a history rather than just a tabula rasa. But beyond the things she has reconstructed and pulled back into transparent focus there are long stretches that remain persistently dark. Given what she remembers from those years, she sometimes grateful for their absence.

"I was in London, then. Not sure I'd wanna go back."

Fr. Echeverría

You spend enough time working with different people and it gets to where you don't have to hear specifics in order to glean. Assumptions don't do anyone any good but neither does prying. He doesn't have the benefit of hearing her life story on the moment of their meeting and he doesn't take her sins from her once a week. No spiritual burden of her lies on his shoulders and she gives no money or food or blessings to him for his troubles.

People like Pan don't do the work they do because they expect recompense. Their recompense comes from something deeper, something brighter, and he could stand here all day and listen to her talk or not talk and that is where the trouble comes in. He cannot stand here all day. His parish needs him.

He doesn't check his watch. They don't need him right this second and he doesn't need to press Sera for more details.

"You don't have to go back," he says. "But if it keeps coming up on you, you gotta turn around and face it."

Serafíne

That gives her a shiver - a deeply felt physical shiver - that she cannot suppress. It crawls up the column of her spine and ricochets out to her shoulder. Even though she stiffens her neck to subvert its movement, it still makes he tense and alert; brings out the tendons in her neck, pulled taut beneath her skin where she has turned her head aside, in profile to him.

Sera closes her eyes, then. Just says fuck it and allows the shiver to run its course through her whipcord frame, all harrow and bone. There's some harrow and bone in her gaze, still, when she opens her eyes again, follows the tracers across the kitchen floor, back to his feet. His fucking resonance; it's everywhere here. It suffuses the plaster and lathe, the structural timbers, the old worn furniture. The window glazing and the window frames.

Fills up the goddamned orange juice with light.

Sera employs her Spanish rarely, but she employs it just so when she calls him by his title. Makes it seem almost intimate, the way her mouth crawls around the word.

"I like looking forward, better, Padre."

She glances aslant, gathers up those things he rescued from abandonment last night and put aside for her: the phone and the clutch. Tucks them into the curve of her right hand and unslings herself from the edge of his kitchen counter.

Starts walking barefoot across the sunwarmed linoleum toward him.

Fr. Echeverría

Proverbs and psalms lurk in the spaces of the scant words he gave her. Outside of the confession booth he has said little to her about God or Jesus or what she does or does not owe Them or herself. Hasn't told her all the things he knows to be true and tells to his flock for they know it all to be true themselves. Doesn't say anything about what would light her path and keep the darkness at her back.

The miracles he performs give back hope to the doubters and pushes back demons and this place will sing with the brightness and the power of what he's done with his life long after he's dead. Whoever leads this parish after him will know the word to be true because he or she will step into this place and be affirmed.

I like looking forward better Padre.

"Good," he says.

When she slides away from the counter the priest watches the Cultist walk across the room and hears the soft padding of her soles against the floor. He has not moved from the sink. He takes his hands off the edge of the porcelain so he can move out of the way of the faucet.

Serafíne

But Serafíne is not walking across the kitchen toward the sink or the faucet. She does not want a glass of fucking water and she does not clean up after herself, not on the regular. Her half-consumed OJ is back there on the counter by the fridge. She is walking across the kitchen toward him.

He has more than a half-foot on her in height. He's double her goddamned weight. She is wearing approximately 1/10 the clothing he wears. That dress is black and lace and see-through. Sure, most people assume there's illusion netting beneath it for modesty, because that's what we expect to see, but most people are wrong. Sera thinks illusion netting sucks.

She's smiling at him, though. Smiling when he endorses her philosophy of the goddamned universe, just finds his eyes and curves her mouth, quick and wry and sure and - pleased with his endorsement. So Sera is walking across the kitchen toward him, and if he shifts position to let her get to the sink, she makes a little bit of a course-correction and there she is in the end, standing right in front of him, closer to him by at least an inch or two or three than might be considered polite conversational distance. Sera does not believe in illusion netting or polite conversational distance.

So it's flirting-in-a-bar distance for her with people she likes, half the time, and regardless of the setting. Like now, with a priest, in the kitchen of his rectory, on a sun-lit Saturday morning. She's still high.

"You saved my trip, you know?" Her eyes are rapt on him. And even if she cries, goes fucking snot-nosed balling on him when she divines an endless series of punishing, cascading futures, and even if cannot sleep without another heart beating close to her own, another set of eyes and lungs to banish the shadows, even if she gets fucked up and paranoid and even if she is goddamned frightened of the goddamned course of the goddamned events of the last few weeks, she loves this fucking world. Loves it and it loves her back.

Sera taps Pan in the center of his chest, just below the sternum, with the edge of her clutch. Another man would take that as an invitation to touch her back, and in a kitchen like this when she's fucked up like that, god probably doesn't want to know what would happen next. We are fairly sure it would involve the kitchen table and three of the four walls. "I was out last night, and I was vibing on this guy. We just clicked, and I wanted to get laid. So we were doing Crouching Tigers, one after the next, and it all felt all right."

He's not another man, though, and she's telling him a story now.

"But then something just shifted. I don't even know where it started. He kept putting his hand on my thigh where I didn't want it, and so I'd move it and he'd put it back and call me a tease. I mean, I was still going to take him home and fuck him, and he's sitting there calling me a tease, like I have some fucking obligation to him. Like what I wear is some sort of contractually mitigated offer of sex if I let you buy me two drinks.

"Maybe he thought he was being a funny guy. Maybe he was just fucking blotto, but there was something in his voice that I hadn't heard before, and I lost the vibe.

"Something aggressive, you know? I don't know. Not enough to surface, but enough that I didn't wanna touch him like that any more. Started creeping me out and things started getting fucked up, so I guess I called a cab.

"Ended up here somehow.

"Things got worse." The whole time she's standing close to him, smelling of Listerine and OJ and his soap and her damp hair, booze and cigarettes embedded in the fibers of her lace dress. Looking up, her pupils wide open, her mouth curved just now, as she bites her lower lip, a strange sort of apology shining in her eyes.

"I don't know how bad. I just know I was - " she inhales and lets that stand for whatever she means to confess or apologize for. Gives him a neat little shrug. Good thing Rose's not around so see the way the gesture makes the hem of her dress rise against her white thighs.

"Then it got better. It was really good."

The way she smiles up at him.

"That was you."

Fr. Echeverría

Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.

When he looks at her he makes no extra effort to keep his eyes above her neckline. His eyes work. He knows she has breasts and long thin legs and smooth young skin. He knows she moves like she thrives off the gazes pulled in by her hips. But his gaze is not pulled in by her hips.

He knows she drinks and fornicates and worships false gods. That she covets and swears and conducts herself in an unclean manner. But he hugs her and lets her sleep on his chest anyway.

The world calls him father. It is a violation of natural order and an abomination unto the Lord to lie with one's children as one lies with a spouse. All of the people in his congregation are as his children. She is not in his congregation.

She calls him father. He is not another man. He is not interested in her flesh.

And once he realizes she has come here to speak close and in his space he puts his hands in his pockets and lets her stand close enough that she could read desire or arousal in him if it were there. He is not a cold man and he is not like resting in the presence of a corpse but he does not want her. Does not even want to save her. His wants are simple and do not involve other people.

Pan listens. Winces when she tells him the boy kept putting his hand where she didn't want it. Waits for the part where things take a turn towards the violent but he knows how the night ended. That darkness between her leaving and her arriving doesn't offer any resolution. Things got worse.

His smile doesn't show teeth and it flees soon as it surfaces but the gladness of her thinking the night good shows.

"Well," he says and puts both hands on her shoulders, paternal, like it's just now dawning on him that she's very close and still half fucked-up, "that's why we don't lock the doors around here. I'm glad you're okay."

His hands leaves her shoulders.

Fr. Echeverría

[SUP STRANGER]

fly

[*GRIN*]

Fr. Echeverría

[Liz I'm calling it now: he's totally going to make a Mage.]

Serafíne

(Haha. He best do. How could he miss out on PAN ECHEVERRIA?)

fly

[Man, after reading this scene, I just may have to :P]

Serafíne

So there's this moment where he puts both hand on her shoulders, paternal. She can feel the strength in his hands and their warmth; the weight of his arms on her shoulders. Light bleeds from him and sparks this brilliant fucking halo around him but he's all in black. The Man in Black. That's what Jim calls him.

And maybe he does it with some paternal intent, like he's just getting that she's close enough to him that she can feel the heat radiant from his body and that her awareness and judgment are mitigated by lingering threads of hallucinations, and she just told him an involved story that started with the premise that she really wanted to have sex with someone last night, and a stranger would do just fine - but, he puts both hands on her shoulders, and she glances down, all aslant, at his forearms. The black hair wiry on his brown skin against the dark and rolled up sleeves.

This time it's not her clutch, but her hand against his chest. Her left hand, the palm just below his sternum, her fingers spread out around it like a five-pointed star.

She can feel his heart beating.

"Still, I just wanted to tell you - " that I think you're nifty " - that you're fucking awesome. Thanks, Pan."

Sometimes, it's enough.

"Gonna walk home."

Sera gives him another one of those smiles, shining, and turns around as he lets her go. Snaps the clutch against her fingernails in this almost meditative rhythm as she walks, feeling all one with the universe. Everything's slipping in and out of her, carelessly, casually hooked into the stream. She walks away, pauses in the living room to grab her heels from wherever they were kicked off the night before, and keeps going, the straps tucked neatly between two fingers in her left hand, phone and clutch cradled in the right.

The fishnets and garters, though. Those she's forgotten. Maybe Rosa will find them when she comes over to have a talk with the Padre. No wonder she thinks he's having an affair.

Tranquila

Fr. Echeverría

Sup, Denver

Fr. Echeverría

He leaves the door unlocked in case something happens in the middle of the night. Lost key mated with his dead of a heart attack. One has to be prepared for things like that. The nursery school teachers, assistants, they would know enough to open the door and stop if they thought something was wrong.

Asleep for hours means he isn't disoriented when the front door opens but time is lost to him and he lacks the normal person's response to sudden awakening. No panic or paralysis. Oh: it's after midnight. The door's open. Someone's inside. Where the fuck. Oh.

This is why he keeps a baseball bat in the bedroom of the rectory. Hasn't played baseball since ninth grade. Didn't finish high school. Could still split someone's scalp with it.

The door opens. Someone's singing in the living room. Doesn't dawn on him until after he's slipped out the bed and picked up the bat and gone prowling lightless through the living room that he recognizes the tune or the voice or the fucked-uppedness of it. Goes to the front door to check make sure it's closed and nobody else is lurking around outside before he goes into the kitchen where he hears something drop. He's 6'2" and Christ knows how many pounds and doesn't move quietly.

A floorboard creaks before he appears a silhouette in the archway between the kitchen and entryway.

Serafíne

The only light in the room is the light shed by the fridge. A triangular swath out over the old linoleum. There's something rolling around on the kitchen floor - a jar of mustard, maybe, in a parabolic arc down through the concave curve of an old soft spot in the subfloor and it is followed by something else. An apple, perfect and round and green from the crisp, rolling in an eccentric slide and -

"Where the fuck - is my kim chi - " it's the sound of his tread in the hallway, the sudden intrusion of his looming shadow, his silohuette etched into the darkness. The walls are breathing in the room, the darkness aswirl, but the walls in here aren't moving yet and she can tell the difference between here and there still.

The singing - which is haphazard and occasional - stops right there and the fridge door just yaws open as she lets it go. Dan's skinnier and Rick's shorter and Dee has fucking boobs and Sera, in her fucking heels - the real thing tonight, not her boots or platforms - and her goddamned party dress - is clunking and clomping through Pan's kitchen trying to be stealthy, poised between fucking flying at the stranger in her hallway and trying to sneak out onto through some other exit.

Fr. Echeverría

He's not remotely dressed. No one has died or threatened to die or given birth or ended up back in the hospital or given any indication they're going to crash at the rectory this evening so the hulking priest is wearing basketball shorts and a t-shirt. His hair is a mess and his feet are bare. His arms are bare.

He still looks like he could fuck her up even without anything to do it with.

When he speaks his voice is rough from being dead-the-fuck-asleep a moment ago.

"Oye," he says, "this is a private residence. You're at Thirteen Ten West Flor--" Then it dawns on him who's rooting around in the kitchen. Sets down the bat so it topples onto the floor out of sight and holds up both his hands like to say just kidding I'm not really armed. "Shit. Hey. Sera. Hey hey hey. Tranquila."

Serafíne

There's a slider from the kitchen to the back patio where she goes to smoke. Sera knows that about her house. Her house. Dee's house. Dahlia's house. So: there's a sliding glass door that should be behind her right now but someone's gone and hidden it or maybe it just keeps moving out of her view. Maybe he's fucking hiding it from her. To try to -

She turns her head sharply aslant when he starts in that rough fucking voice, a stranger with a baseball bat and great shadowed bulk and the kitchen, the space she's allowed to have in the kitchen between the breathing walls is getting smaller.

By the time he says her name, by the time he sets down the bat so it topples and falls over and is saying - shit. Hey. Sera. - she doesn't believe his voice anymore.

"GET. OUT." She advances on him with a drunken sway, holding a bottle of (very. expensive.) Scotch in front of her like a weapon. Like a fucking sword. Even fucked up, her body remembers the forms. "ALL OF YOU."

There's just one of him. Maybe she's more than just a bit drunk.

Fr. Echeverría

"Sera."

Calm still but it's late and he's slightly scrambled and he can't remember what she calls him on the regular because she's called him Padre and she's called him Francisco and she's called him Pan and he doesn't know her well enough to know what she would recognize out of all of them in the state she's in.

He doesn't get out, him or any of him, but he doesn't panic or run at her either. Doesn't matter to her in the state she's in. He's blocking her way out and he isn't afraid of her and if she hit him with the bottle he or all of them would probably go down without a fight. His stupid voice stays calm and nonjudgmental even when she's waving the full-ass bottle of scotch at him.

"I'm sorry, chica, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you. This your place? Huh? Where you at right now?"

Serafíne

"Just - " she's breathing heavily now; her heart's beating faster, spiked with adrenaline. There's speed in her system from the LSD and the room is spinning and the light that spills in behind him is like an arc-welder, all flame. As quickly as she turned that bottle into some semblance of a weapon she turns it back into a bottle, with a mere shift of her grip on the neck of it. " - just stay back - "

And she's edging closer to him, the kitchen dark behind her. The suggestion of her face, dark make up ringing her eyes, lipstick smeared across her mouth. The world's smallest dress, and thigh-high fishnets and visible garters holding them up. But now she's not looking at him anymore, but behind her. At the shadows of the kitchen, which lean and yaw as the fridge door swings lazily further.

"It's - it's supposed to be - " But everything's wrong, like some dark space ate the garden and is pouring in after her and she turns around then, backing up as if the shadows in the kitchen were advancing on her. " - what the fuck?"

It's when she bumps into something. Him maybe, or the edge of the door frame, or some fucking holy family portrait on the wall while she's backing up that she explodes into motion. Charging him like she's some fucking linebacker opening up a lane for a running back. Or like she's a fucked up girl for whom the shadows are hungry and changed and dangerous and she needs to get out of there. Now.

Fr. Echeverría

- just stay back -

"Okay," he says. "It's okay."

It isn't him she bumps into because Him has his hands out far enough she can see them but not far enough she's gonna think his arms are wings or tendrils or some other unholy inhuman appendage and each step she takes towards him has him taking a bigger one back away from her. Maybe she doesn't bump into anything at all. Just thinks she does. The wall leaps out at her or something.

She leaps out at him.

Problem is she charges him like she's a linebacker and he actually is big enough to be a linebacker. She's half his size and all she's got going for her is she's high on Christ knows what and he hasn't even had a cup of coffee since she was a baby, only lights a cigarette to fuel an effect and even then it's the act of lighting it that does it not the effect of dragging off of it. One of those high on life motherfuckers and she needs to get out of there but he needs her to not go tearing ass down the street and get her ass hit by a car so he wraps her up in a goddamn bear hug.

"Sera, stop," he says. "Sera. Tranquila, woman, I ain't gonna hurt you."

Serafíne

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe the fucking mustard rolling around on the worn linoleum startled her. Maybe some spiderweb memory of some dark place and some dark thing cross-fired with this dark place and this dark thing and there's John Brogan out there somewhere and he smiled at her, and the shadows at the walls and moonlight and replaced them with darkness and then there's the restraints they'd use, sometimes.

Pan wraps her in a bearhug to keep her from running out into the street like she's being pursued by the hounds of hell, and he's twice her size. She's wriggly-as-fuck but she weighs maybe 110 pounds soaking wet. That's if you count the make-up and the chains and the heavy leather boots and tonight she's wearing no more than the world's smallest dress and a half-dozen necklaces and her ubiquitous fishnets and shoes that must be doing some sort of permanent damage to her feet, so she's nearly his height (by which we mean: he only has four inches or so on her) but nowhere near his size, and he grabs her around the waist and wraps his arms around her upper arms and pulls her back into the bulk of her body and speaks like that, repeating her name, repeating his promise that he's not gonna hurt her while her spine's rigid against his chest, and even so he has to struggle to hold onto her for that first thirty seconds because she's fucking fighting him hard, beating the flat of her palms on his forearm, dropping the Scotch (whoops) to try to get better traction to peel his solid arms away from her body and then hey she remembers that she's fucking magic and -

- recognizes him, too. Just before she tries to pull the fucked up threads of her Very Bad Trip together and scare the fuck out of him.

She doesn't struggling all at once but she does stop. Says, " - Pan?" almost experimentally to the darkness behind her.

Fr. Echeverría

And he doesn't know beyond what she told him last week - she can't sleep without someone else there - that John Brogan got inside her head like he did. Isn't any way he would be able to know something like that. The priest was five-foot-five once but that was back when he was like twelve and it's different going through your whole life being five-foot-five and a woman.

Can sit in on all the NA meetings in the world and put himself between a Fallen and a girl young enough to be his daughter all he wants and let her fall asleep on his chest every night for the rest of his stupid life but that don't mean he's going to know what kind of fear Sera feels like someone like John Brogan looks at her.

He gives up negotiating after a couple of seconds because he loses his wind and has to concentrate on holding her arms still and he ends up with his back against a wall and by the time she starts to crackle the air around them with her magick and comes back to herself and says his name his heart is hammering against her spine and he's not winded but he's not breathing too easy neither.

"Hey," he says like she knocked on the door and he opened it and this is how they're talking now, not like he's got her pinned against him in the dark. "Can I let you go now?"

Serafíne

Her hair's all tangled around them; she smells like alcohol and something sweeter. He can't smell the LSD on her because she took it long ago, but the sweetness is the fucking orange juice on her breath. He can't smell the LSD on her breath, but if he could see her eyes right now, he'd read it there. The pupils hugely dilated, nearly devouring her irises, spreading sparks and tailings and tracers around the room. In the struggle she's kicked off her fucking shoes, so now that she's not using her legs as leverage to struggle free of his grip there's just her toes touching. She lost her bottle somewhere along the way but it didn't shatter as it dropped to the floor, probably because she's so goddamned short. Not enough time to build up momentum.

He asks if he can let her go now, and she tips her head back into his chest chest and then just nods, which he'll feel more than see in the darkness. It means: Yes, you can let me go now.

He can't feel her heart the way she can feel his, but her heart is beating like that too. Rapid as a frightened rabbit.

Fr. Echeverría

"You're at the rectory. Okay? I'm gonna count to three and then I'm gonna let you go."

He hasn't had much occasion to make promises or keep them but tonight isn't the night he turns out to be a man who doesn't keep his word. Stands there with his back against the wall until the count of three and he counts even but not arduous and when he lets her go it's even too. Keeps his hands at her elbows in case she falls out or tries to bolt again but she's back to herself now.

Keeps his mouth shut after that too.

Serafíne

Serafíne stumbles a bit, but she does not fall or try to bolt.

Doesn't say anything either, beyond a shake of her head (the "no - " sort, a shake rather than a nod) when he tells her that she's at the rectory, okay? - not when he gives her the terms, not when he lets her go.

Instead, as soon as she is free, all under her own control, she turns immediately around and rises on her fucking tip-toes and throws her arms around his neck and hugs him tight. Tight like there could be demons at her fucking back, and she's not going to let go.

Fr. Echeverría

If she's making him paranoid or anxious he keeps it tamped down. No one else was at the door and no one else is in the apartment. This place is warded against psychic intrusion but not against physical. If something were after her it'd be in here by now but all that's after her is coming from inside her head and the rotten-sweet smell of booze metabolizing on her breath doesn't push it away.

He doesn't push her away either. Blows out a breath sounds like he's been holding it since he found her in his kitchen and waits a couple seconds to gauge she isn't going to let go and then he hugs her tight but not tight like when he was restraining her. Tight like when she hugged him in the sanctuary after he said he'd help and he got the idea she needed it.

"Vale, Sera, vale," he says to her neck, her hair. "Ahora estás a salvo, alright, just take it easy."

Serafíne

She smiles against his chest, mostly hidden, when he assures her that she's okay, she's okay, she's safe, alright. Take it easy. Turns her head into the warmth of his mouth, which is really little more than the movement of her tangled, sweat-damped curls against his cheek and jaw.

In the next few moments, her grip on his neck shifts, eases back, so that her hug is loosely ringed around his shoulders rather than tightly clenched. That's all, though. As I mentioned, she doesn't seem like she's going to let go.

Her eyes drift up, though. Past the edge of his cheek and jaw, his ear, his black hair threaded with silver, above him into the darkness pooled on the ceiling of the hall.

"Pan - how'd you get here?"

Fr. Echeverría

The fact that she made it this far isn't a testament to her tolerance. It's more like that old adage about God looking after children and drunks and even that's part bullshit if you take into consideration how many kids God lets splatter in car crashes and school shootings and everything else every day versus the number of drunks who walk away from what the Euthanatos would call Fate without much more than a scratch to show for it.

No point talking Fate or God or Anything with someone in the midst of a bad trip though.

"Tell you in the morning," he says. "Let's get you some water and go to sleep, huh?"

Serafíne

"'Kay." - returns Sera, rather sweetly now, almost entirely quiescent and apparently content to stand in the Pan's hallway with her arms around his neck and her cheek resting against his chest. Quiescent enough now that he could probably lift her arms from around his neck and give them back to her and she'd accept them with that same sweet note in the back of her throat.

" - how'd you get into my head though." Flatly asked, like a poorly phrased rhetorical question, some shadow of a thought drifting across her features. Then, a note of concern between her brows. "Can you get out?"

Quiescent unless he tries to walk her back into the kitchen to get that water. Then she stops and refuses to continue for love or money. If he wants to get her water, he's going to have to leave her in the hall and retrieve it from the sink or fridge, because she is not going the fuck in there.

Fr. Echeverría

"Yeah, I can get out. Here."

So he twines her arms down off his shoulders and steps away slow until he's sure she's going to stay put. Ducks into the kitchen long enough to grab a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and then steps back out again and steers her deeper into the living room.

When she's sat down on the couch with her boots across the room where she kicked them in her fruitless struggle he crouches down next to the couch and uncaps the bottle and hands it to her.

"Drink," he says. "I'm gonna get you a pillow."

Serafíne

"I don't - " - that narrow line between her brows deepens. "I don't want you to go."

Oh, she is seated on the couch now just where he's settled her, and she accepts the uncapped bottle and drinks when he tells her to drink, pouring back several gulping mouthfuls. Even though she tells him she doesn't want him to go, she doesn't do anything to stop him, and is seemingly glued in place on the couch. Maybe she's pinned there by the shadows of the room.

He can stand, pad off to retrieve a musty old pillow from the linen closet. And while he's leaving or as he's returning - at some point, it should be said, when he is behind her rather than in front of her - she lifts her chin as if she were listening to some memory of an old wax recording and had to hold her head just so to hear it proper.

At that point, she asks, equally quietly. "Do you think he could see?"