Fucking Idiots.

Serafíne

She fell asleep in the bathroom; wouldn't move, wouldn't let him touch her. Just sat there on the toilet seat listing ever-so-slowly to the right under her cheek found the edge of the vanity, and then she slowly laid down her head. The room was sideways then, shunting light and dark on the floor, the vanity and its shadows. Her eyes half-open for another ten or fifteen or twenty minutes as she resisted sleep and wished for the fucking champagne bottle and thought about moving but did not move because she could not remember how muscles worked in the body. In her body or any other.

Then at some point: sleep, hard to tell the drunken dreaming from the true thing, except for the way her spine lost what remained of its coordination and her body sagged further aslant. By then he had made up his, or hers, on the couch. Maybe checked on her twice and found her still gauging whether or not she could reach the champagne without falling over. Maybe he was already drifting off to sleep when she fell from her perch, asleep, onto the bathroom floor, too fucked up, and too deeply asleep, to even notice.

So he found her there, curled up at the base of the toilet, carried her, already twitching and murmuring from incipient nightmares, to his bedroom and his bed. Tucked her beneath his sheets without her waking and saw her agitation, the strain of her sleep, the choking darkness of nightmares drifting up from the depths of her subconscious. The locked-away memories John Brogan had offered to unlock for her, if she could but turn and face them.

And he put his hands on the crown of her head. Murmured a prayer, to Mary, the Mother of God and watched her quiet.

Pan was up long before Serafíne. There were vespers to be prayed and morning mass to be conducted; the day care to be inspected and the day's appointments to be tended to. He was up two or three hours after she woke him and had put in nearly a full day's work by the time she crawled to consciousness accompanied by the incipient pounding of a sick headache and some other, dark and wretched curl of something nameless in the back of her throat.

This is not the first time Serafíne has awoken in a strange bed.

--

She's awake when he returns from morning mass and morning prayers and morning meets. Freshly showered. She let the water run through all the hot water and all the cold water while her skin turned pink and then white from the shock, while she scrubbed scrubbed scrubbed at herself with his fucking bar of fucking Dial soap until she had nearly raised welts on her skin. Picked out the remaining bits of glass embedded in her feet and thighs. Washed her hair three times, gasping in the icy frigid water the second and third times.

He finds her standing in his kitchen, leaning against the counter, wearing last night's clothes. The fucking bustier bra, the front covered in textured pink roses. Tiny little skirt held together by leather strips and safety pins and a prayer, barefoot on his linoleum. Has his cheap old plastic comb and is pulling it through her hair.

Pan

He fell asleep standing in front of the reception desk in the office. Not for long. Long enough for Rosa to walk in on him and jolt him out of it with a hand on his elbow. She knows better than to ask him what's going on. She doesn't want to know and she doesn't want to get involved and he would never ask her that.

"You need to sleep," she said."I will.""Before you're dead.""I will, Rosa. Relajáte.""When will you be back?""I don't know. Don't burn the place down before I get back."

Back across the street he said a prayer before he let himself in the front door and found her in the kitchen. Looked as if he'd slept all night, full of vigor and good energy. She could feel the intensity of the minor miracle.

"Let's go," he said. "We got a long drive."

-----

If they talk in the car it's of little of consequence. Maybe she sleeps most of the way, until they turn off the highway and their speed drops twenty miles per hour. He doesn't touch her to wake her up if she does sleep. Starts whistling to himself like as not to keep his concentration up and then they're there.

He shaved before he left the house this morning and his eyes reveal an alert mind but his skin and the muscle beneath betray his exhaustion. He hasn't been sleeping enough lately. Wonder why.

"Alright," he says, like that's that. Doesn't get out the truck right away. Kills the engine and sits in thought a moment.

Jim

Jim is getting tanner. Going on months of outdoor yoga, first in the parks of Denver, then out here in the woods where the light peaks through trees and rays that aren't visible to eyes still manage to touch and transmutate the skin in their spectra, through even the cloud cover.

Maybe it hadn't been as noticeable in the amber glow of the firelight, shifting through all the autumn and incendiary colors the previous night, but it's definitely showing when the truck pulls up and he walks out of the cabin to greet them. The headlights bathe him, standing there still barefoot, in a plaid robe that only comes down to about halfway up his thigh. Thankfully they can see he's wearing undershorts beneath as each stride takes him closer to the car.

He has a glass in his hand. Ice and liquid the color of maple syrup. Dark liquor. He swirls the glass with the twist and gyration of his wrist as he does so. Walks up to the window of the truck.

Pale blue eyes fall on Serafine when he does so. Leans against it, hoping the window will come down, though if it doesn't he opens the door for her and the words are the same. "Serafine, angel, come in side and sit. And we'll talk and you'll feel better," he says, sure of the last thing, or at least sure - it's plain on his face, plain as any emotion that manages to crack and crumble that stoic exterior is - that he'd do whatever he could to make her feel better. To rejuvenate that soul that sometimes, in the right light, you can tell in his eyes he's in awe of. Connected to. Kindred to.

And with that, his hand comes out. Slowly. Tentatively. And the glass he'd been swirling, she'd see now the rim is bone dry. It was meant for her. His hand takes hers only long enough to put a drink in it. Perhaps to grasp the back of her palm and fingers long enough it could simply to make sure she has a good hold on the cool glass. But that probably isn't the only reasons.

Serafíne

Sera says nothing; not really. She follows him to the truck, stopping only to grab a little bag on a chain of a black zippered rose, her heels (though these she carries by two fingers of her left hand) and, incidentally, the bottle of cheap and now flat and now warm champagne that she lost last night. Carries it with a shadow of her usual arrogant swagger, but that's muscle memory more than anything.

Pan asks for the bottle of champagne back before she's out the door. Open fucking container laws. She rolls her eyes and hands it back to him, giving him the bulbous bottom of the bottle. Holding onto the neck as long as she can. But she gives it up.

She climbs in on her own power; glances at Pan once or twice, enough that she can read the exhaustion etched into his skin in the morning light, as the city whirs along beside them. Then just sits there, her forehead against the glass in the passenger's window, wet hair slowly drying down her back. If she falls asleep, she falls back into the nightmares she sleeps too deeply to wake herself from. Of which she remembers only the bile in the back of her throat. So she tries not to sleep.

She's still leaning against the window when they arrive; the world changed. The close crowding of the city gone. The shadows of trees spread across the windshield of Pan's truck, but she straightens Pan kills the engine, glances at his profile once more. Then lifts her gaze to follow Jim's track down the steps from the front porch, across the sun-dappled drive, her gaze dull and removed. Watching him mostly because he's the only thing moving in their immediate world.

The window does not come down; she doesn't even turn to look at him, but there's this point where he opens the door for her and can see that she was reaching toward the handle to open it for herself.

Sera is not as bone-deep and physically exhausted as the priest, but there's that dull sheen to her eyes, all withdrawn. When Jim says her name her eyes touch his face and her brows drawn minutely together and her mouth compresses firmly around her teeth.

Slides out of the passenger's seat then, barefoot on the graveled drive and therefore five or so inches shorter than she usually is and accepts the drink from Jim's hand with a grateful sort of fucking grimace that aspires to but never becomes a smile.

When he grasps the back of her hand, though. She stiffens her shoulders, turns her head in this sharp and negative gesture. "Don't." All firm, not looking at him but refusing the comfort of contact. Just: Don't.

"I'll be fine." A sharp breath expelled, the grimace slips into a tight, rallying sort of twist of her mouth and she cuts past him, headed for the cabin.

Spent forty-five minutes in the priest's shower this morning, Sera. She still feels too fucking filthy to be touched.

Pan

[perc + awareness-as-empathy: payback for last night]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 6, 6, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

Serafíne

Sera feels worse today than she did last night. Despite his prayer the remnants of the nightmares lingered; she doesn't know waht they were about but she remembers the feeling and the feeling is gross. And it makes her feel even grosser, not just because of brogan, but because of whatever's inside her. Which Pan knows about from their talk a bit. Maybe Brogan broke it loose? She's not usually troubled by it like this and never has nightmares. She's afraid and ashamed and angry and withdrawn and either doesn't want them to know - IDK, Stuff, Lori, Stuff. On some level, she feels like she's radioactive. She's pretty resilient but right now she feels so gross.

Also she's probably steeling herself up to like go back and see Brogan. or something. SELF SACRIFICE. So maybe there's that, too.

Pan

All he does is sit and watch. What they saw of each other in the bathroom last night is not enough to take away the filth of what she thinks and what she feels and so he sits and watches Jim come down out into the late morning sunlight and he watches Sera sharp and fast in her pulling back into herself.

And she doesn't know by now because he tends to write her off as drunk or high when she acts out. Doesn't stop to figure out what's underneath the makeup and the fishnets because if she wanted him to know she would go ahead and tell him. He isn't her pastor and she isn't his daughter. Other than the tenuous binds that come from community they owe each other nothing.

But there's a lot of reasons why his resonance feels like light. Light shines from things holy and clean but fire is also bright. So are floodlights, road flares. Atomic bombs are so bright they burn the shadows of the dead into brick. He does not have a temper but that does not mean he has not asked God to give him the power to kill before.

He prays for guidance and another solution every goddamn time but last night didn't tell him anything other than what they already know. John Brogan is a demon and they cannot destroy his Avatar so that only leaves one other option.

Pan gives Jim a look that is only a small fraction of an apology and gets out of the truck. The chassis rocks with the loss of his weight and he leaves the door open. Leaves the keys in the ignition. The console dings at him but he ignores it.

Walks right up behind Sera and takes her upper arm in a hand that feels as if it has never been soft.

"Hey," he says. Doesn't let go of her.

Jim

Jim crosses his arms as he sees Pan walking by, intent on gaining on Serafine before she reaches that big wooden front door. He leans against the truck, legs crossing so that his left heel is to the right of where it should be, watching his finally run her down and put his hand on her arm. The ding of the truck, eventually, gets to him.

Probably not.

But either way, maybe to offer this interaction a bit of privacy, he does his own circling of Pan's car, takes the key from the ignition, takes his time figuring out how to lock it, though he probably knows how to lock a car. Seals up the vehicle and takes his time, again, the long away around the back end and bed, swinging the keys from their ring on his index finger.

Gives them time, reaching into the front pocket of the robe and pulling out a small cylinder of crumpled and twisted paper with God knows and they know and who really couldn't guess what inside? A lighter, his being tapped and slapped before its found (how do you lose a lighter when you're wearing a robe and underpants? Jim finds a way.

Jim finds many ways to give them privacy and time to figure out what a hand on the arm, what walking away, what Hey, what all that means. To sort it out before again interjecting himself into the situation, puffing away and admiring the smoke for its changing ways, disappearing and reappearing in different beams of light in the growing night.

Serafíne

Sera's taken a sip or two of the drink Jim brought her on her path back to the cabin; maybe more than a fucking sip. She didn't eat breakfast in Pan's kitchen, not one of his fucking apples and not his wilted lettuce and not his orange juice and there was no coffee for her to make. Maybe she had a glass of water from the tap, and then another, but she has had nothing solid since before she got on stage this night last, with her friends behind her and John Brogan cloaking himself from her sensing back there somewhere in the audience, watching her.

He did nothing to her that another man might not do. He watched her from the back of the bar; when the set was over, he crossed the dance floor at a deliberate pace to intercept her. She saw him as she was returning the microphone to the stand and froze. He asked her to dance and she fucking agreed and he was pleased that she had. Humor an old man. He told her that she was special. That she could be something great if she just listened to him. But really, look at her. Assholes say shit like that all the time to girls like her, and she isn't the sort to listen to assholes.

Assholes don't usually block out the noise of the crowd so that, if he wanted you to, no one could hear you scream. We consider these things technicalities.

--

Hey - says Pan, and puts his hand around Sera's upper arm.

"Don't touch me." The words are autonomic, quite nearly. No deliberation and no thought and they're torn out of her throat.

They have nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with Pan or Jim or anyone but Sera and there's a note of apology, the rising whine of it, in the me that's obviated if he does not let her go.

She jerks herself hard away from him that her drink sloshes out onto the dusty gravel nevermind the solid belts of it she's already downed. Hard enough that she might give herself whiplash, but she's half his weight and hung over and hungry and drinking again and the tension in her is suddenly enough to make her tremble.

"I'm sorry Pan just let me go."

Pan

"Este no ayuda nada, Sera."

He says this quiet the way he offers prayers at the bedside of the sick, clutching the hands of the people who stay behind when a loved one dies. Like his presence is not a physical thing but a gateway between them and understanding. It's a calm and incontrovertible statement.

And he says this quiet the way he said m'hija last night. But he doesn't let her go. He makes that face like forgive me before he hugs her. And she can struggle all she wants but it won't do too much good. His arms are as thick as her thighs and he isn't hungover and he isn't shaking like he can't stand his own insides. She can feel his heart slamming against his ribs from the effort of holding her still but he does hold her still.

He waits until she stops struggling before he says anything.

"I don't know what all you done, or you think you done, but I know this: they don't just fall out the bed one day and wake up wrong. Listen: They make a choice, alright, and it's the wrong one, and they gotta follow through with it. They gotta push through everything tells a normal person that it's fucked up and then they're stuck with it. They're beyond whatever kind of fucked up you think you are."

Serafíne

And she does struggle. Spills even more of the drink and then drops it without meaning to do so, though the glass does not shatter. It hits a hummock of dirt and grass rolls down a slight slope to settle in old tire tracks. Then she has both hands free to push firmly and furiously at his forearms and twist her sharp, narrow shoulders and cause all the lashing muscles of her torso to contract and then open up with the parabolic movement of a whip set in motion.

Her back is mostly bare; she's all sharp-spine and bony prominences and when she finally calms down it is only because it is clearly fucking futile and so: his heart is slamming in his chest; her breath is sharp and short and her voice is raw and she angles her head sharply away from him as he speaks to her, the tension in her jaw a palpable, visible thing.

Swallows back her first, lashing curse of a response to him, closing her eyes. Takes in a breath deep enough to expand her chest like a bellows, a breath deep enough to catch the scent of the joint Jim's lighting. Tips her head back against the priest's chest so she can look up through the branches of the trees at the sky.

"You're right. I know that Pan." There's apology in her tone. Maybe gratitude or grace, but her voice is tight and still sharp, clotted with withheld emotion. "I really do."

She swallows something back. Then,

"I just don't feel it right now."

Which is all she ever wants to do.

Jim

Jim ashes the short and stout spliff, taking short pulls though the thing keeps burning so damn fast, and finally holds it up to flick off the cherry with the tip of his index finger. A lick and a press, and the excitement of its end has died.

Just a few puffs to take the edge off. He could feel the edge. It hasn't been dulled. Not even a bit. Maybe Pan and Serafine would straighten out whatever it was that needed straightening... It looked like something would get straightened the way Jim watches him wrap her up in those oak-bough-arms. But the edge was more that sword of Damocles handing over them all. Threatening to fall or to cut the rope and let loose War and worse.

His approach is slow, up the drive, more a stroll than what Pan had tipped into to catch up with Serafine. He'd caught a little of it. The tail end of Pan and most of what Serafine had said.

"You fight a guy like that? You put him down. You prove him wrong? You kill him. Serafine, angel, that's what you are. Burning. You burn with love. It's your fuel and you're its match. And the fact something he could say would scare you so much? That alone proves him wrong," Jim interjects, a voice at the edge of the light that steps into it from his path from the truck a moment later.

Pan

His heart beats slower once she stops fighting and the breathlessness finds its place in the cadence of his speech. The force goes out of his joints but he doesn't let go of her. If he could draw that wrongness out of her with his own self she can't doubt now that she would.

It's enough to hear her say something true.

"I know you don't. We're not gonna leave you though. Alright?" He loosens his arms from around her torso and holds his hands on her shoulders a moment to rest his forehead on the crown of her head. Lets her go then and stoops to pick up the glass she dropped. Comes back to his feet like the stooping brought the exhaustion smashing down on him.

He stands still long enough to bear witness to what Jim says and doesn't interject. Might just not understand what the Cultist is saying. They operate on two different planes of existence.

Serafíne

There haven't been tears in her eyes in the past twenty-four hours. Not once through it all; but for the first time she can feel them spring to prominence in her eyes. Just enough to shine in the headlights. Not enough to fall.

She closes her eyes against them; leans her head back ever-so-slightly as Pan rests his forehead on her skull. Her hair's still damp in the center from her shower two fucking hours earlier, it's so thick. Also: Pan Echeverría needs to buy some better shampoo and maybe some fucking conditioner.

The faintest nod acknowledges Pan's reassurance, and a hard swallow follows. When he lets her go she's still grateful to be returned to herself, but there's a shiver down her spine, mostly forestalled, contained in her torso.

Sera shoots Jim a look of taut gratitude in the moment after. Opens her shining eyes and gives him another limited-engagement nod, this tight little smile, the sort women wear at funerals, remembering old stories with love, smiling through tears. Some part of her wants to hug him, too, but she still just feels unclean. That look, the shining eyes, the tight little that flattens her mouth will have to do.

Breathes out a huff of a breath, which is shaped like a laugh without any of its inflections, and compresses that smile into some taut and not-quite-ironic.

"He likes me, Jim. Asked me to dance." There's a different tone to her voice now, though. Pan and Jim can hear it; less of the desperation in her distress. Sera's trying for fucking humor. Irony. It falls well short of the mark, but she no longer sounds like she's suffocating under the idea of John Brogan's regard. "He didn't hurt me or anything. Just asked me to come around and sign recruiting papers. You know. Thinks I have what it takes to make it high up in his organization.

"But he's a fucking liar and he thinks that fucking alcohol pollutes the body, so I'm pretty sure I don't qualify. Dancing sucks too." There's something hollow about her flippancy, like she's putting on a show for herself or them or the universe but it is her flippancy and she's gritting her teeth and moving under her own power, then. Up the steps and into the cabin.

Jim

She starts, tears threatening and then there, maybe still lingering by the time she starts explaining exactly what happens to Jim. His head tilts to the side, his hands fold in front of him, the dead joint between two fingers, and he ends all these gestures with the climax of a sigh and shaking his head. "How could he not? Serafine." He simply says her name. Repeats it. Had he ever called her any less than her full name?

Probably not. Because every time he says it, even now, it's like each syllable breaks down into a bit of who she is. Like a True Name, like meaning shared from knowing it the ways he knows it from knowing her.

Jim wasn't one for idle reassurances or promises it will all be okay. His are more concrete. Logical, if that logic is spun together and woven in addled and muddled color gossamer that threatens to break, spun glass that builds beautiful ideas and abstracts. Not beautiful, here, but hard to ignore as he continues. "He wants you. He wants Leah too. It's no more a reflection on who you are than it is on that terrified girl in that cabin. A bastard like him wants a beautiful soul so he can break it and make it in his own image. It's not you he likes. It's not who you are. It's what he can do to you. That's what he likes/wants/needs," the last a flurry of words that bleed together into a new construction.

And then, she's off, up the steps to that cabin, and he's following, tucking what survives of the joint behind his ear.

Pan

"Jim."

His voice is like the wind rustling against the leaves around them, a formless thing that could topple an entire tree if he got it into his head to do so. Even when he stands up at the pulpit and preaches you can hear the rough tracks in the life he's lead and that doesn't do anything to weakness the man's charisma. Even in all black like to take attention off of his height and his bulk he pulls the faithful to him like the sun pulls the planets.

"Hang on a minute, I wanna talk to you."

Serafíne

The look Sera shoots Jim is a profile view; her eyes shadowed, her cheek curved. Her eyes are dark from this angle by there's a layering to the survey as she mounts the steps. And he can see the pullback in her, the way she nods so faintly when he compares her to Leah that that note, that note in particular, strikes a chord deep enough to vibrate in her for long moments afterward. To pull her a little bit more back into herself.

Sera glances at Pan when he says Jim's name, hesitates a moment herself, this sketch of a question in her brows, then heads inside.

Jim

Jim's hands unfold, falling to his side, when Pan asks for a moment alone with him. His doesn't react to it as if he's surprised or even hesitant, only waits to see that Serafine has gone inside, and then turns his attention back to the priest.

They are the same the way men are the same, in some important ways, but so very different in others. Of course, there are also things they care about. Things they share. And this leaves Jim looking open to what Pan needs to share, now, with him and in the privacy outside the house.

He does not nod, simply waits, ready to listen.

Pan

He doesn't stand before the other Disciple like a frightened man awaiting judgment or redemption. It's a dissemination of information and he keeps it from Sera because Sera is shaky. Because Sera hasn't asked him.

Because he knows where Sera is heading in her mind and he doesn't know Jim near as well. Who the hell even knows.

The priest puts his hands in his pockets and casts his grass-green eyes towards the road once and brief to make sure nothing is coming for them. In the sunlight the shadows beneath his eyes are dark as if he's strode away from a recent fight. His hair is growing unkempt and Jim can see the gray and white shot through the black of it louder now than he has the other times he's seen the man. He's not wearing sunglasses. His voice gets quieter for the knowledge that Sera is behind them.

When he looks back he says, "By the time I broke through his wards the other night I didn't have nothing left to keep him out of my head, but I found him. I know where he is. I'm going over there--" He pulls his hand out of his pocket to check the watch strapped to his right wrist. His face reveals nothing as he puts the hand back. "I'm going over there. This needs to end, like, yesterday."

Jim

Jim, again, doesn't not. He soaks it in, though. Is mindful of Pan's tone. Decided. And he doesn't disagree. But he comes to the conversation on his own terms, also unafraid of being judged for those terms.

"I live my life by a law of love and a promise of peace. But those are my laws. My promise to myself," and saying such, to a religious man of holy orders and righteous action, may seem... Well, it isn't wholly ironic, but might be mistaken for such.

"You find him and you do what you have to do, holy man," and the words, they can't be mistaken for sarcasm, not the way Jim says them. It isn't satire either. It is an honest descriptor, like he's saying what he maybe referred to the Chorister as in his own internal dialogue. " I won't stand in your way. And I'll stand in the way of his violence, however I can."

"I hope you come back. And I hope Leah, Serafine, none of us, have to worry about him again," and then he pauses, considering what he's said thus far and finding no qualms with his own statements. "How?" Turning on a dime, it is genuinely inquisitive.

Pan

And he doesn't judge. Even if he doesn't agree he just lets it be and he doesn't retaliate. He didn't flinch away from the cannabis smoke when it drifted towards him and more than he flinched away from Sera's insistence that he not touch her. Intuition drives him more than it drives some other people but the thing that gets him where he needs to go is his humility and the steady onward marching of his boots.

Ain't a whole lot you can do with a person like that and Jim doesn't aim to. No qualms in his statements but then a question.

"How?" he asks, repetition gone to counter-question with the furrow of his brow. He doesn't have an anchor point for it.

Jim

"How will you end it? Who will go with you? How can I help? I've got ideas on the last one, but I want to know more, what to expect, not that you can have... Expectations? For something like this. Hopes. Dreams, maybe. Nightmares. But not expectations," he finishes, clarifying.

Pan

The priest nods. They're on the same page again.

"I will call on the name of the Lord," he says, "and he will answer with fire." He gestures with a pointed finger to the cabin, at the girls gone back from the windows and the doors. "We've already as good as lost one of them. I don't intend to let another one walk into that Hell he calls a new beginning. You can help by keeping her here until it's done."

Jim

Jim listens to that first part and doesn't blink. He understands the meaning behind it. He would do what he thought was right, the way he thought it would be done, and it would be done, and Jim accepts the basic truths that Pan doesn't say, but that he is still able to find in what others might find...

Disturbing? Lunacy?

They may not actually be on the same page, or even reading the same book, but they care about the same library not being burnt to the ground. Jim is more accepting. He waits until Pan moves on to the other questions, answering them, before nodding.

Just a nod. It's hard to say more, really, and Jim doesn't speak to hear himself speak. He looks back at the cabin. "She should be with someone," turning toward the door, as if they should go inside, now that is settled.

Pan

"Yeah." He takes the hand not attached to the watch from his pocket but does not hold it out. Sees the doors to the truck are shut and hazards a guess. "Gonna need the keys back."

Jim

Jim tosses them to Pan and heads into the cabin.

Pan

He catches them - barely: if he played anything besides Doctor in high school it was Basketball and that was what thirty years ago? - and takes his other hand out of his pocket and turns to walk back down the driveway.

Serafíne

So, not listening at the door. Serafíne respected their privacy and left them alone; she's made a nest for herself in one corner of the couch

She has exchanged her rose-covered bustier for an inside-out t-shirt that makes her look as young as she is. Younger maybe. That nest on the couch has provisioned herself with a glass of ice water and an as-yet unopened bag of sourdough pretzel nuggets and the soapstone box in which some of the smoking paraphernalia is sometimes stored. Maybe a fucking afghan, uncoiled around her bare legs as she rises and heads back to the door.

Then Jim's coming in and Pan's not behind him. Sera has a carved pipe in one hand, the haze of smoke coiling lazy from her nostrils as she glances between them, then comes back outside. The scent is strong in the air around her and the pot is calming her, taking - oh yes - more of the edge that the two of them sanded so finely down for her.

Sera cuts a glance from Jim to the priest's retreating back.

"Where's he going?"

Jim

"The man has a flock to tend to," is Jim's answer, glancing over his shoulder at Pan's retreating - but still impressive - form. He's already got his keys and is heading toward or by now maybe even into a truck, an aged behemoth of metal to match its owner's brawn. And sometimes the wolves must be beaten off, he thinks, but remembers Pan's words.

There was a time where Jim lived a life of crime and that included as many lies and as much deceit as one would expect. He is by no means rusty as it, maybe even has to force the words out, but will them to come as smoothly as they once did. "Can't expect him to do it here," he finishes.

Crafted. A lie of omission, but no less on.

[ Manipulation + Subterfuge. Dropping a WP. ]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 4, 4, 6, 6, 6) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Serafíne

Perception + Awareness-as-empathy

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (4, 5, 6, 8, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 7 ) Re-rolls: 1

Serafíne

"You're lying."

And immediately Sera is tight-faced and tight-voiced and sharp spined again, pulling back from Jim and pushing past him, out through the front door. Running, flat out, down the steps. Not as fast as she might have under other circumstances, when she was better rested or had she eaten anything, anything at all in the last 24 hours and she is serious enough because she gets that something else just happened out there and Jim lying is as rare as a fucking eclipse of the moon-and-sun-and-stars in her experience so:

one hurtling, underfed, hung-over, starting-to-be-stoned cultist comes running at Pan Echeverría's from behind and pushes him, sharply, furiously.

"Where are you going! Where the fuck do you think you're going. If you think you're going over there by your fucking self - " and fuck them both now she's crying, shouting and shaking and very much unable to see straight. She felt John Brogan's will as he batted down her attempt to divine his future.

She cleaned up Pan's blood from the passenger's seat of his car.

" - right now, I will fucking murder you. You fucking stupid fucking priest."

Pan

He does not rush along the path and he has just reached the truck when bare feet hit the dirt right behind him and bare palms hit him in the back. A hand against the roof of the truck salvages his balance and he turns around to face her.

Unlike Jim he doesn't bother trying to lie. He couldn't do it even in his past life. Men as big and easily tipped towards violent as Francisco Echeverría was don't have to lie to get through life.

"Sera," he says and puts the keys back into his pocket. "Sera, I'm not going nowhere." She cleaned his blood out of his truck. He puts his arm over her shoulders and starts to walk back with her. "I'm sorry. Tranquila, tranquila, I'm sorry. Come on, let's go inside, you don't got any shoes on."

Jim

"I'm-" but she's past him, and he's sighing, crossing his arms again, following behind her but at a significantly slower pace. She's well into her admonishment of Serafine by the time he catches up.

Maybe he'd considered lying again, but the way she's seen through it, like a child through a spider's web, only leaves him looking ashamed at the fact he had lied in the first place and that his instinctual inclination had been to simply do so again.

"I'm sorry," instead, to Serafine and Pan both as they head up the path again.

Serafíne

And Sera: she's all wild now, keeps pushing Pan or punching for several seconds after he had given in to her assault and is turning her around and telling her that he's not going anywhere, that she should be calm, that he's coming back inside, that she doesn't have any shoes on.

Then she stops, ceases, turns around, and the priest lays an arm around her shoulders and the truth is somewhere underneath her passionate denunciation of Pan's decision she still doesn't really want to be touched she has forgotten that or remembered also what it feels like to be her and she leans into Pan's arm and jabs him in the flank with her elbow just as a fucking reminder that he is a fucking idiot and she is not putting up with it.

When Jim comes up, looking ashamed, apologizing, she stands there for a moment staring at him, then just shakes her head, that long blonde hair, breaks free of the priest or perhaps drags him forward because she does not quite trust him and then shakes herself free and launches herself at Jim. Wraps her arms around him in a tight and shaking hug, her small frame electric with adrenaline. The pipe is gone; dropped somewhere on the drive and she hardly notices.

Sera kisses Jim on the cheek and then the forehead, her hands clasped around his skull, then leans back and tells him, "He's a fucking idiot. You're a fucking idiot too."

Waits for Pan to draw abreast and then reaches to loop his arm over her shoulders or some fucking thing again, though once more she makes like she wants to punch him in the gut.

"That's okay. Because I'm not. And I'm not helpless. And I'm not stupid. And we're going to come up with a plan.

"And whatever it is, we're going to do this together."

Missing you. [STing]

Justin

The stress level among Denver's Awakened population had been notably high of late - and little wonder. If Justin had known just how bad things had gotten, he would have been right there along with them. He knew enough though. Enough to make him more than a little paranoid whenever he went out into the city. Enough that he'd been spending the past few weeks hunting for danger that seemed rather disinterested in being found.

He didn't know that others had already found it. He didn't know that the reason he hadn't found a trace of the missing girl was because she'd been taken into the woods for safekeeping. More than likely the couple of people who had his number thought it best to spare him the danger and the anxiety when there wasn't much he could have done to help. No more than the rest of them, anyway.

But that didn't stop him from worrying. And worry without a proper outlet was a useless feeling. Today it had driven him, as it often did, to seek refuge from his wired nerves in Red Rocks park. Having long-since adjusted to the new elevation, he'd made a habit of coming out here to hike or climb once or twice a week. Tonight it was the former. The narrow, dusty Trading Post Trail took him along a winding pathway of beautiful stone formations and rough Colorado scrub-land. At one point earlier he'd paused to scale one of those large formations in order to get a better look at the landscape around him.

A couple of women had passed by beneath and asked if he'd be alright getting down. They were the only faces he'd seen in the past fifteen minutes. Now he was coming to an area that opened up at a fork in the trail. There was a massive boulder perched on the side of the hill before him and he paused to take it in, red dust settling on his jeans and hiking boots. He carried a small backpack with him, the contents of which consisted of a large bottle of water, a couple of granola bars, his shirt (which he'd pulled off and stashed away about ten minutes into the hike,) and a handgun. (His knife, which he never left the house without, was in his pocket.)

Justin

[Not that it matters really, but he'd have a Mind Shield up because he always does, so Mind 1 diff 4 -1 (focus)]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (4, 9) ( success x 2 )

Justin

[Extending once, +1]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (4, 5) ( success x 2 )

Justin

[Per+Awareness]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Justin

[Per+Alertness, -2 diff for Acute Senses]

Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (5, 5, 5, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )

Twilight

Dex + Stealth

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Justin

[Ack, I forgot to roll Nightmares]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 3, 6, 10) ( success x 2 )

Twilight

Justin's observant and alert. His senses are sharper and more sure. He can smell the sun on the rocks; the cucumber melon lotion and sweat of the women who walked by his perch, high on some outcropping, and asked him if he could make it down again on his own, lingering in the air when he does clamber back down. He can hear the faint susseration of the wind through the scrub, the scrabble of some tiny clawed thing among the rocks; the distant call of a hawk he see, riding a lazy thermal somewhere in the high, clear air.

He cannot see her. He cannot hear her. Is not at all aware of her until her shadow cuts across right shoulder, and her voice sounds in his left ear.

"You did take your time getting up here."

The cold flat edge of a knife at his back; just at the level of his right kidney.

"It was worth the wait, though, Justin."

She takes in his scent with a sharp inhale; he can hear the pleasure in her voice. The note of almost rose-tinted nostalgia. All summer loss, all golden glow.

"And don't worry about me. The whole time, I entertained myself by speculating about which fork you would choose."

The edge of her smile, as sharp as that knife at his back.

Justin

[-1 WP to not a: throw up and b: go into shock]

Justin

He remembered her voice. Over time the details of her face had grown dark and shadowed - a malevolent phantasm to haunt his dreams. But her voice - that he remembered. The soft, slippery tone of it still whispered sometimes on the wind when the world around him grew quiet.

And he remembered the way she felt. The sadistic, feral energy. He hadn't heard her approach. He wouldn't have. He could hear a person's heartbeat on the silent air but he could not hear the movement of a ghost. Neither had he felt her powerful presence - right up until that moment when she pressed the knife to his back and spoke. Until she allowed her impenetrable cloak to drop by speaking his name. Then he felt her - when it was too late. The nauseating force of it nearly caused him to wretch, and he clamped his jaw down with enough force that it made the hinge pop.

He froze, of course. What else does one do in that situation? For one second, two... five. While she spoke. And during that time he wasn't here. He wasn't looking out at this picturesque landscape but rather at a rough, blood-soaked cement wall. For a second he felt the pain of her knife sinking into his kidney even before she had a chance to make good on her threat. Because she had before. And he remembered. His body would remember her for as long as it lived.

If she looked, she might see the faintest twitch of a muscle in his right hand.

"Why are you here?" he finally asked. And it was a shock to find his voice even worked.

Twilight

Why are you here?

Oh, his question has her laughing; laughing low and laughing bright, her tone rich with an animal sort of affection, the feral promise of some great cat embedded in the tone. Her breath is warm on his left shoulder, she's standing that close. Leaning in to him without ever touching him, except for the edge of her blade.

The heat of her body like a halo he can feel; particularly with his exquisitely sensitive senses. The fine hairs stir in his flesh, prickle upward as the sweat from his vigorous hike and the heat of the day begins to dry on his skin.

"I missed you," there's something raw there; something rich. Her nostalgia is blooded and red and raw as the torn-apart corpse of a gazelle at the feet of a lionness. "We always had something special, you and I.

"I knew I'd find you again.

"It's Fate, Justin. We were meant to be.

"You've known that from the beginning. Haven't you."

Justin

His eyelids fluttered as they fell, lowering as if to block out the sight of something that wasn't even there. Her breath on his shoulder caused an involuntary shudder that rolled up his spine and broke against the back of his neck. This time he couldn't suppress the muscle spasm that caused his head to jerk to the side.

"I don't believe in that kind of fate." But it didn't really matter whether he believed in it or not, because she was here. Five years later, she'd somehow managed to track him all the way from Boston to Denver. The logical part of his mind might make the right connection - that her presence here had nothing to do with him. That it was just a horrible fucking coincidence. But whatever was left of his logical mind was currently being drowned out by a much more powerful and much less rational fear.

That was the thing about this kind of fear. The kind that burrowed its way into your marrow. It never really let you go, no matter how much time passed.

But there was something else flooding his system right now. Something more than fear. Adrenaline. Instinct. (Fight or Flight.) And this was who he was at the deepest level. A creature of instinct - like any Verbena.

She was standing so close. There was a knife at his back. She could kill him with a single motion of her hand. (Unless he caught her by surprise.)

[Init +6]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (5) ( fail )

Twilight

Init +7

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (7) ( success x 1 )

Justin

[Declare: Backwards head-butt - is there a name for that? I am clearly not a fighting person.]

Twilight

Declare: Choke hold / clinch

Twilight

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 6, 7, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 5 )

Justin

[Str+Brawl]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Twilight

Damage

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Justin

[Soak!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 7, 7) ( success x 2 )

Twilight

She feels him tense his shoulders, pulling forward ever so minutely in preparation for the backwards blow he intends to deliver before he has begin the movement. And she's faster tonight. Wraps her scarred arms around his neck and cinches them closed in a choke hold that brings her body forward against his and her chin sharp against his neck, just beneath the curve of his ear; just under the joint of his jaw. He tries to break free, but she's compressing his trachea hard enough that he cannot move or she'll choke the wind out of him.

"That." The single word is sharp as a blade. Her teeth are against his ear, they compress sharply on the tenderest part. "Was unwise, Justin. Just like old times."

(She's so fucking happy that he did that. He can feel that sadistic joy coiled in her body, the potentiality rapt with the potential energy of a compressed spring.)

After the bite of her teeth into his ear, the warmth of her breath is almost soothing. And her voice folds back on itself, in a quiet, nearly reflective regret.

"I will so regret turning you over to him. But the cause is the cause."

Justin

He did not catch her by surprise, but it had been a long shot and he'd known it. He'd also counted on the fact that she wasn't likely to kill him quickly - and she hadn't. (No, that wasn't her style.)

She'd senses the spring of his muscles contracting before he'd even had a chance to do what he'd intended to do - to throw back his head and strike a rough blow to her own. Instead her arm had wrenched across his neck and squeezed. The force of it bruised his throat and forced the breath from his lungs.

Justin didn't know who the man was that she spoke of. If it even was a man. Maybe it was some awful Nephandic spirit or deity. Either way, it was clearly not someone he ever wanted to meet. Her choke-hold restricted his ability to speak, so instead he just grit his teeth and dug his fingers deeper into the scarred surface of her arm, twisting his body in an attempt to break free from the hold.

[Bruised level, no modifier - Init +6]

Dice: 1 d10 TN1 (3) ( success x 1 )

Justin

[Edit: Sensed the spring of his muscles]

Twilight

+7

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (4) ( fail )

Twilight

Str + Brawl

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 1

Justin

[Str+Brawl Resiiiiiiiist!]

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

Twilight

Damage:

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 6, 6, 9) ( success x 3 )

Justin

[Soak!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (7, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )

Justin

[Init +6]

Dice: 1 d10 TN1 (5) ( success x 1 )

Twilight

Init +7

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (6) ( success x 1 )

Twilight

Str + Brawl

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

Justin

[Str+Brawl - this is going to be a long night]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Twilight

Damage!

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 10) ( success x 1 )

Justin

[Soak!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )

Twilight

STR + BRAWL

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Justin

[Come oooon Justin!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 5, 7, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Twilight

The struggle continues for some time. She has control over him but he's resisting. He's enduring and sustaining the constant pressure of her scarred arms around his neck.

She's fucking laughing through it; he can feel the hitch of her diaphragm against his bare spine, the resonance through his chest The scrape of her teeth against his ear. She's enjoying this; not just the way he tries to resist her, twists his body around in the cage of her arms, but his resilience too.

Then he breaks free and her laughter explodes from her. From any other woman it would sound bright and silvery; but somehow from her throat the bright sound is already tarnished, the sound loops around him like an oily chain.

"You don't know how much I've missed you. We're going to have so much fun."

Justin

They matched each other for a few achingly long moments, her arm crushing his throat and his own buffering the force of her hold. And then there was a great, rough motion as he finally tore himself from her grasp. She taunted him as he broke free. Laughed at him.

But he didn't say anything back. He didn't call her an unhinged psychotic bitch or snarl or spit in her face, because she would have enjoyed it, and she would have just laughed harder. Instead he jumped away from her and spun around, puling open his bag to reach for the gun.

[Init +6 I'm so going to lose this]

Dice: 1 d10 TN1 (8) ( success x 1 )

Twilight

+7 go go gadget!

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (7) ( success x 1 )

Justin

[again!]

Dice: 1 d10 TN1 (3) ( success x 1 )

Twilight

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (8) ( success x 1 )

Justin

[Declare: Split action Shooting twice]

Twilight

[Declare: disarm.]

Twilight

Dice: 8 d10 TN7 (3, 5, 5, 6, 7, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 4 )

Twilight

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 5, 6, 6, 9) ( success x 3 )

Justin

[Dex+Firearms -2 for split +2 diff - hah]

Dice: 4 d10 TN8 (1, 1, 2, 9) ( success x 1 )

Justin

[Damage 4 for light pistol]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Twilight

SOAK.

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Justin

[Second Shot -3 +1 diff]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Justin

[Damage 4 + 2 successes]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 7) ( success x 4 )

Twilight

The struggle is brief and violent. He breaks free; she's laughing - fucking joyous - and her face, without the scars, is so lovely and so wrong. Her laughter oozes like tar sands coating a pristine beach, and the gleam in her blue eyes is like some sort of wretched, reversed flame. The spiraled, burning madness.

Dust is kicked up in their struggle. He is able to pull his gun from his pack because she's just so fucking pleased to have him again. Even if she only has him for a day, for a night, for another goddamned fight. But she has her knife, and once more she moves faster than he. Instead of going for his jugular she goes for his pistol, a kick and a blow nearly dislodges it from his hand, but he holds on and turns the weapon on her.

The pain from the first bullet has her eyes bulging, another surge of sick, wild joy from her, and he can already feel her beginning to pull inward on that thread of pain to heal the wound he's caused her, can feel the first coiling of her will nascent in the air around her.

But then the pistol is steadier. And this time, the bullet catches her in the cheek and then continues downward, exploding out of the back of her skull.

Her eyes are open with shock, her mouth sags as blood comes spurting in a great torrent from her nose. Two steps back, and the knife falls from her nerveless fingers.

Three steps back, and she falls to her knees. Then face forward on the trail.

Dead.

2:53 a.m.

Serafíne

2:53 a.m. Wednesday-into-Thursday morning.

Hard to say what wakes him up. The slam of the car door outside on the dark and quiet street, or the rustling of his bushes. She doesn't ring his fucking doorbell but that is a close thing. There's the errant whine of the front door opening late at night and the clatter of heels on his old, battered hardwood floors. The solid thunk of a small frame against drywall, as she gets disoriented in the darkness.

This night last she was stoned but calm and clear and humming, beneath her breath, a soothing song as she scrubbed his dried blood from his back, all one-with-the-universe. Cleaned the passenger's side of the truck too, with whatever chemicals were tucked beneath the sink and the world's largest pile of paper towels. Left him to sleep in his truck and spent the rest of her evening sitting at the fire; or maybe sleeping in the cabin, and caught a ride back to Denver with him the next morning, too.

Told him she had a gig that night. One she couldn't miss because she'd skipped out on so many recently, her bandmates getting pissed (Rick) or just hurt (Dee). Did he know that they still don't have a name? Bright and sober in the morning light, Sera prattled about inconsequential things all the way back. She did not ask him if he had called Rafael, but we would be lying if we said she had not checked the history of her phone to see if a call had been made. Beyond the suggestion and offer, though, she'd said nothing more about it.

There's a moment where she's standing in the dark in his little hallway, swaying like a reed, deciding Where to Go Next. Whether to wake him or just sink to the floor with her bottle and wait for morning. She's drunk. She's really fucking drunk, and that's what decides her. Her body.

--

So maybe what wakes him is the sound of her retching. The bilious scent of her vomit.

This is where he finds her: in his bathroom, on her hands and knees on the bathmat, poised over his toilet. She is wearing a bikini-style bustier. The band is black, tapered and hooked in the back. The cups are covered with tiny, textured pink roses. That's what he sees: the black band interrupting the long articulation of her spine, her bare flanks heaving, this hitching, segmental crawl of her vertebrae as her body spasms and she pukes.

Again, and again, and again.

Long hair hanging everywhere, her shoes kicked off. Hands flat on the linoleum. The soles of her feet dirty in her fishnets, a few beads of dried blood from minor lacerations on her ankles and lower calves.

A nearly-full bottle of fairly cheap champagne is parked on the floor by the bathtub.

Hard to smell anything but vomit and alcohol, but there's this, too: the faint threads of her frustrated Work are hanging in the air around her. Overlaid with the lingering, oleaginous corruption of His.

Pan

It's the collision of impermanent body against drywall that jolts him. The hinges and the heels started to slowly drag him up out of his nothingness but the closeness and the loudness of that thump thrusts open his eyes and he sits up before registering honest and full why it is he's on his feet and going for the baseball bat.

Last time he hadn't called out a warning to the intruder before coming upon her in the kitchen. He hadn't fully dressed. Tonight for whatever reason he fell asleep on top of the sheets and blankets in his socked feet and dress clothing. Another funeral maybe. Last Rites late at night. Whatever: she does not have the presence of mind to note that but for the shoes that when he appears on the threshold between the bathroom and the hallway he's dressed all in black.

The arm holding onto the baseball bat remains out of sight.

"Madre de Dios."
The quickest prayer he knows.

Before he steps into the bathroom he puts the bat down in the corner. The handle clicks against the drywall and his feet make no sound. The pulsing of John Brogan's resonance does not frighten him out into the hallway. He swallows down the rise of copper in his throat and crouches down to take up her hair in both his hands, peel it off her face and neck and hold it back. Doesn't put a hand anywhere else.

When he speaks, if he speaks, it's in the lull between purges.

"Estoy aquí," he says and his voice is quiet and still-rough with sleep. "Estás a salvo, no te puede encontrar."

Serafíne

How did he know not to touch her? He just peels her hair off her face and neck; and even in the middle of purging he can see her muscles tense and flinch when his hands come close to her skin. Had he put a hand on her, her shoulder or her heaving spine, she would have recoiled like a wounded animal, lashed out with the flare of a half-hissed warning. But he does not touch her; just skims up her hair in his hands and holds it back as she throws up.

The only think in her stomach is a churning mixture of alcohol, but her diaphragm continues spasming three or four times after her stomach is entirely emptied out. She just kneels there, crouched over the toilet, letting it all come up. Acknowledging his presence only with a faint, stiff nod when that rough, quiet Spanish emerges in the moments when she's catching her breath.

Serafíne is not injured. Not seriously; there's not a bruise or a mark on her body, except for a few small cuts on her lower legs and feet where she was lacerated by flying glass from the whiskey bottle she dropped on the dance floor after he left. Her feet and legs are sticky with it, and when she finally, finally, finally makes it through a full and quiet minute without dry heaving, and sits back on her heels, and reaches up to rub her mouth with the back of her right hand and flush away her stomach contents, it is the sticky-sweet smokiness of the whiskey that remains behind, the dominant scent beneath the churning bile.

A moment of stillness, before she reaches up and puts her hand through her hair, slowly shaking it free of his hands without coming close to touching him.

The she reaches out, shuts the toilet seat and lid in one gesture and lifts herself to perch on the edge of the seat. Legs together, knees together, shoulders forward, hunched and curled, this self-protective posture that invites no comfort. She is aware of him (she cannot ignore him), and he knows this by the way she avoids so much as looking in his direction. By the way she turns her head so that she cannot and need not see him. Keeping her eyes down, searching the floor for her bottle of cheap champagne.

If the champagne is in reach, she reaches for it. If not, she holds out her hand expectantly, as if he's supposed to enable her. Pass on more booze because she's just emptied her stomach entirely into his toilet.

"He came to the show," she tells him; when she can speak at last. Five minutes or more sitting there, feeling the room spin, tasting the acid burn in the back of her throat. She's looking ahead, at the darkness in the hall. Just cheats her face toward him enough that he can tell she's addressing him. But she cannot fucking look at him; can hardly look at his shadow.

"He likes me."

Here, a sharp little inhale flares her nostrils. Her eyes are glassy, her movements loose as a snake with its jaw unhinged. "Thinks I've got real - " and a shuddering exhale, " - potential."

Pan

He has a son. He had a relationship with his son's mother when she was still pregnant. The sort of relationship where she trusted him enough to thrust her inconsolable baby at his father as soon as his father got home smelling of brake dust and heroin withdrawal. Francisco learned when he was eighteen years old what happens when a man puts his hand on a woman when she's knelt over the toilet to vomit.

Beyond that: he feels the Fallen's resonance warping the air around her. The thought of touching her does not repulse him but it was not too long ago that he smacked away Annie's hand and roared at her to get off of him before he fell out of the passenger seat of the truck and revealed himself to be too concussed to walk properly. Not entirely sure if he was yelling at Annie or at the Fallen.

As soon as she straightens from her supplicant posture he lets go her hair and hauls himself to his feet. The crackling of sinovial joints when he knelt was a dull dry sound lost beneath the wetness of rejected alcohol but when he stands his ankles and vertebrae pop like dust on lit kindling. He does not complain. He gives her her space.

She has to pick up the champagne bottle herself but this is not a large bathroom. By the time she starts to speak he's out in the hallway again, a dark form in the shadows. Doesn't occur to her much during her hours of sobriety but Father Echeverría is a tall, broad, scary-looking man. He's got eyes easily inclined to broadcast wildness and when he stands in ill light with his face unshaven and his hair mussed he looks like he could Fall or lose his mind and no one would notice until he was burying that baseball bat in someone's head.

It's no wonder she can't look at him.

"Demons will say all sorts of things to open up cracks you already got," he says. "And we all got cracks where they can get in, girl. But you can't listen to him or they're gonna get bigger. Él es un mentiroso, you understand? He lies. That's what they do."

Serafíne

So she reaches for the champagne bottle herself as he's exiting the bathroom. Is uncoordinated enough that she almost topples from the seat of the toilet before she somehow rights herself and carries her prize in a triumphant sweep upward. Holds it by the neck and takes a long, sour pull from the bulbous mouth, then tucks the bottle firmly between her thighs. Hugs it close.

Él es un mentiroso.

It's the Spanish that pulls her eyes right up to him; this huffed out, scoffing breath, the faintest roll of her eyes for his naivetée, drunk and glassy as they are.

"Yeah?" Her right hand goes to her mouth, asmear with crimson lipstick, then. Cups her chin, index finger and thumb spread across her mouth and she contracts her paraspinals to forestall the shudder that wants to open up through her body. Left hand's raised though, pointer finger crooked like a parliamentarian stepping up to the microphone countering some half-remembered opposition argument. "Well. He didn't ask you or Jim to pop 'round his place for a little chat sometime."

Her attention slips from him, drips away like the yolk of an egg sliding down a wall. She is looking off at something unseeable just stage left when she remembers, suddenly, the fucking champagne bottle and takes another swig.

"Did he."

It's not his darkness, the wildness in his eyes. The rumpled clothes and rough scrim of black-and-gray whiskers bristling under his dark skin. Not his wild eyes or the bulk of his shadow in the hall that keeps has her shunting her gaze away.

It's her shame.

"He sees something in me."

Pan

So the priest drags his hand down his face. The scruff on his jaws hisses against the callouses on his palms and she hears him sigh but it's not frustration or bewilderment. A weight settles on his shoulders and he shores himself up against it. Eyes the bat once before he steps back into the bathroom, memorizes its placement in case something walks through the door that don't belong here.

He crouches next to her the way he did when he dragged her up from sleep in the sanctuary weeks ago, down on one knee with his arms draped across his thigh.

"He's warped, Sera," he says, "his mind and his Avatar, everything is trashed and it's not coming back. You didn't do nothing or say nothing to get his attention. Could just as easily been Shoshannah or Sid." A beat. "Besides, I go 'round his place, I'll kill him. That's why he don't invite me over for tea."

Serafíne

That night he woke her from sleep she - well, she yearned toward the warmth of his solid body. She always does: such a physical, tactile creature. Tonight when he sinks low beside her, settling his considerable weight on one aging knee, she turns almost imperceptibly away from him. Scoots a half-inch to closer to the counter on the toilet seat, without every realizing, entirely, that she's shying from any contact, any contact whatsoever.

He tells her it could just as easily have been Shoshannah or Sid, and Sera shakes her head, a wordless, immanent no. Obdurate and intractable. He is wrong, and Serafíne knows this as surely as she knows that she has already decided not to give in to the sick roil of revulsion and shame so fucking alive inside her tonight.

"This wasn't a chance encounter." Her chin drifts downward, away from him. She is avoiding him and avoiding any stretch of his reflection in the vanity mirror, looking down at the battered undersink cabinet through the sweep of her dark lashes. Sera swallows, picks up the bottle and holds it sideways while her unfocused eyes crawl over the label, without ever really seeing it. "He sought me out. He was waiting for him.

"I couldn't feel him. He cloaked himself so I wouldn't sense him, but he was there the whole time, watching." Her voice is almost inflectionless, her gaze cast off to the side. Face almost expressionless except for the bladed little twist of a half-huffed smile with that last word. Watching. "I didn't see him until we were finished. Walking through the crowd on the dance floor.

"My friends were up there. Dan and Dee and Rick. Told Dan to get them outta there and jumped down to intercept him.

"He could see my fear. Asked me why I didn't run away. What the fuck - " and as she tells the story, there's a drunken-sort of sobriety creeping back into her. The room's still spinning, he can see that in the way she sways in place, even sitting still. In the way she leans forward, clutching the bottle of champagne like it was a lifeline. " - like that would've done me any good."

And her band was there; up on the stage behind her.

"He asked me to dance." A side glance here; her eyes on his shadow, then his knee, then his arm. Perhaps his mouth, never quite his eyes. "I'm not lying, Pan. He was pleased when I said yes."

Then her eyes close. She's too tired to stave off the shudder that envelopes her small frame, and does not bother to try.

Pan

"I believe you. Can I have that?"

That - the champagne bottle. He doesn't reach out to take it from her and he won't even if she refuses to hand it to him. He indicates it with a tilt of his chin all the same, his eyes flicking from her face to the bottle and back. If she gives it to him he thanks her and sets it down underneath the sink where it won't spill if a boot hits it or a hand loses its grip.

If she clings to it he lets her. Doesn't move to impede upon her space any more than he already has.

"Sera. Look at me."

Serafíne

Maybe it's the I believe you or the shadowed movement of his head. The tilt of his chin. The quiet calm in his voice that has her dropping her eyes to the neck of the bottle and considering it and considering her shadow in the overhead light cast down over the tiled floor. She wraps her hand around the neck and lifts it up, waveringly, holding it out to him. Lets it go as soon as he has grabbed it, and thoroughly regrets the loss.

Then he tells her to look at me.

And she does. This fractional movement of her eyes, this sidelong look that does not resolve itself into a straightforward response.
There's spittle at the corners of her mouth. Dried white.

Pan

"M'ija..."

He says it gentle but slow, as if it causes him a pain he deflects to see her like this. It's no more powerful or purposeful than the Madre de Dios he breathed into the air when he saw her dropped in front of the toilet but neither is it a prayer for guidance or protection. The dark wretched part of her that attracted the Fallen does not beat back the priest.

Maybe he doesn't see it or he doesn't even know what she's on about. Doesn't matter. He looks at her with the same compassion with which he would look at any of the members of his parish come to him saying they used again, they slept with their husband's brother again, they wanted an abortion. Doesn't look at her like he's about to tell her every single person on this planet is a sinner himself included and he isn't going to judge her but it's true.

She isn't one of his flock but it's gone beyond that now. He lets the law and God deal with the problems that his parishioners cannot rectify with his help. Never in his life has he told someone who took Communion from him that he'd kill someone who was fucking with them. That's where they're at, now. Isn't even a vengeance thing. Pan called John Brogan a demon. It's gone beyond that now.

"How'd you get away from him?"

Serafíne

Maybe it's the pain in his eyes that hooks her gaze, and keeps her own blue eyes fixed on him. She's wearing stage make-up. Heavy black liner, heavy black mascara. Dark shadow all around, though it has smeared with her sweat, her scrubbing hands. Only the mascara has survived the night intact.

But it hurts her to look at him. Like he's too clean and too bright and too sure for her to comprehend.

Like she's too drenched in filth to be this close to him.

All that in the framing tension of her eyes.

There's a hook-curl to her mouth, though. He asks her how she got away from him, and she breathes out a huff of laughter.

"He let me go."

--

Breathes in, altogether, all-at-once.

"Told me he wouldn't stop me if I ran away from the beginning."

But her friends were there; and in any case: running away does not seem to be in Serafíne's nature. She's always fucking running toward everything.

"He said I shouldn't be afraid of him. That I should be wary, but not afraid. He said that alcohol pollutes the body. And that we were shaky for the first three songs.

"Said I'm not like you. That you were strong, but I could be limitless, because I understand things that you don't. Like pain. Not what it feels like, but what it means." The quote is so direct, so well-remembered, that she has to drop her eyes from his, and Pan can almost hear the Brogan's resonant tone embedded in Sera's low, familiar voice. "He cut out all the noise from the crowd; closed us in and told me that he could give me back everything I'm missing, everything I've closed off, if I was strong enough to look.

"I tried to scry his future."

She's staring down at the floor again, her head drifting and bobbing like a buoy on the dark, dark ocean. A line between her brows.

"He felt me Working and shut it down. Didn't even bother to hurt me."

--

She stares at the floor, silent, for several long heartbeats. This heaves a breath, her shoulders lilting upward with it.

"He said, I should come talk to him. That you know where to find him. And that I should come alone, or the next time he wouldn't be as friendly."

Without the champagne bottle to support her weight, Sera has slowly curled her arms inward, low around her torso. Her brows rises in an expressive lilt, like she cannot quite believe in the denouement.

"Then he just left. I didn't get away from him. He let me go."

Pan

Through all of that Pan just rests where he is on his one knee that isn't going to hold up through too many more decades of kneeling and he watches her even when she won't look at him and he doesn't interrupt. Doesn't even look like he wants to interrupt. He could listen to her talk all night but the night is hurtling towards a conclusion.

She thinks she knows the dance after this. Water and a blanket. No aspirin, no sex, nothing that could take away the consequence of drinking beyond the fact that he accepts this as a part of her, a choice she makes, a lifestyle and not an addiction.

He knows where to find John Brogan and he knows what he'll find when he gets there and what he's capable of and he knows if he goes it won't be a surprise and he knows what pain is and what it is to inflict pain and what it is to endure pain and he knows what it is to see nothing but blackness empty and starving when you look in the goddamn mirror and to regret every breath you're cursed to haul in and to get it into your head that one day it'd be better to choke off the breathing than go through another day but he doesn't tell her any of this.

It's better for her and everybody else if they think he's nothing but light and strength and stupid baseless hope.

He pulls himself to his feet and uses the sink for leverage and swallows the exertion it takes to get up off cold hard tile rather than worn carpet over worn hardwood.

"We're done talking to him."

Serafíne

Oh, she knows the dance. The way the couch cushions compress beneath her weight; the way the cording lining the upholstery will dig into her face and leave a line in her cheek for the first half-house after she awakens. The way that immanent sense of light that remains, radiant, in the space even after the lights are off and full night has fallen will infect her sleep or her hallucinations. The musty smell of the old pillow he pulls out for her.

She knows it but isn't thinking about any of it. Seems so lost, so drenched in the wrongness of Brogan's Work, around and about her, and never to her, not that night. Not until she tried to divine his future - in the wrongess of Brogan's Work and his words and his knowledge, and his awareness of the lapses in her own history.

Do you think he saw -

- she asked Pan, not even a week ago. The priest thought she meant: her. Asked her if she had felt him scrying. This is what she meant, though: did he see the holes in her; the missing pieces that she knows will only be filled by dark and darker things.

And again, fucking again, Sera will not look at Pan. She always looks at him, keeps her eyes steady on him when he's in any space they share. Pan has no idea that she does this or what it means, but Rosa does. Rose would. Tonight, Sera looks at Pan only when the priest directs her to do so, or when he moves, as he does now, rising in her peripheral vision.

How it is she sees him, really, sees him, in the midst of her own drunken misery is a question best left to the gods of chance and Dionysius, too. But her attention hangs on him, captured, her mouth half-open, for a heart-stopping stutter-step of time.

Then she closes her eyes. Contemplates reaching for the bottle of champagne he took away from her, because she does not want to be on that couch along with her thoughts. Gauges whether or not she could do it without falling over, and concludes that she cannot.

She's listing to the right now. Nodding a bit but not so much in agreement as with the movement of the room.

Oh, god, she wants to tell him how sorry she is.
But her throat is closed and she's not sure she remembers the words.

Next time he won't be as friendly.

Serafíne

They still do not have a name, the quartet. Sera has taken to calling them NAMELESS the band when she takes the stage, but the joke's falling flat with Dahlia and Rick now. It never really falls flat with Dan because he loves her and more to the point - he knows exactly what's going on. Knows why she has been missing and fucked up when she hasn't been missing. Knows why she skipped that one gig she got them at Lone Star and why she turned down another couple-three that came in in the interim. He also knows that Dee and Rick need something more in their lives than their dead-end retail work and that Dee's been getting antsy and he's the only who booked this gig, on the strength of an old mixtap with some of their old band and some of the stuff they played out in North Carolina, before Sera and Dan followed Rick and Dee to Denver.

Took Sera two or three songs to get into the rhythm on the stage; took the rest of them a couple more after that, but somehow mid-way through the night it all came together. Sera got the vibe and spread it out and she was her usual self - bantering with the audience and her bandmates, drawing flashes of white-toothed smile even from Dee, who has taken Sera's distance the hardest. Fucking up the intros and bringing them back around. Drinking and drinking and drinking from the bottle of whiskey she commandeered from the bartender the minute she arrived, getting looser and brighter as the lights and faces blur together and the energy builds all around and in her.

Rearranging the set-list to accommodate some shouted request for some old Echo and the Bunnymen song the rest of them only sort of know. So Sera pulled her guitar (which, frankly, mostly lives on her spine through the set and only gets pulled around occasionally) and accompanied herself singing Lips Like Sugar and pretending she was a moody and modish Englishman from the mid-1980s, well before she was born.

And so the night circles 'round. The last few songs are always an improvisation of some sort. A dedication or some fucking thing. Tonight, Sera leans back to murmur something to Dan and he carries the word to the others because the rhythm underneath is what keeps the song moving forward. Sera's standing forward, her guitar on her back again, one hand on the mike stand and the other wrapped around the neck of her whiskey bottle. She's not satisfied with the first two starts Rick and Dee make and counts them off a third time, and this time something catches. She's bobbing her head by the time Dan comes in strumming and launches into a cover that settles into a meditative groove, except for the way the chorus rises and starts to soar before slipping back into the hypnotic groove.

Moments like this, Sera is both serene and divine, drifting around the mike stand, singing, half-dancing, half-tranced, magnetic and one-with-fucking-everything.

Entropy

Serafine didn't see the man at the back of the room while she was singing, and that was surely for the best because if she had... the band may not have finished the set. And they needed this - not just for the exposure or the money but because musicians needed to perform. They needed the rapturous swell of the music and the heady energy of the crowd. Given all she had been through the past few weeks, it was just the kind of rejuvenating outlet that Serafine probably needed.

And in a perfect world - in a just world - she would have that. She would have these moments of beauty to renew her when life was anything but.

But the night was over all too soon. And then there he was. Moving through the crowd toward the stage at a leisurely gait, like he genuinely had nowhere else to be. Like he had all the time in the world. She should have felt him coming from across the room, but tonight his powerful energy had been muted somehow (cloaked.) Only a silent void where his commanding presence should have been.

Not that he needed it. Brogan had a natural presence to him that superseded his supernatural abilities. He was dressed in a pair of black jeans and new-looking leather boots, with a button-down red shirt (how appropriate.)

"You guys are pretty good. A little shaky at the beginning."

Serafíne

Had she sensed his presence at the beginning of the set, she would have whispered something to Dan and stood up there with her fucking whiskey while the fucking band packed up their shit all around her and she stood alone, singing a capella. Working her way maybe through the whole oeuvre of the Smiths and Joy Division until the people she cared about were packed up and out of his reach.

Had she sensed him at the end, she would have done the same thing - some extended encore, lingering more-than-half drunk at the microphone, crooning a mesmerizing rendition of Asleep by the Smiths like an endless lullaby until Dan had herded the others out of there.

But Serafíne had not sensed him at all. So the songs end and the band is starting to pack up their gear and Sera's laughing with them, all bright now, not like a diamond so much as a crinkled piece of tinfoil, but they both gleam when the light's on them, don't they? Laughing at a joke that Dee shunts her way and once more skipping out on packing up because she's too fucking drunk. All she does is return the mike to its cradle, hand off her electric guitar to Dan (or rather, let him pull it off her body, flirting with him when his hands find her hip), and then retrieve her bottle of booze.

She's standing at the edge of the small stage when she sees him, sailing through the crowd like a preternatural shark. Goes all still for a moment, something physical and thoroughly animal about her in that moment, before she jumps the fuck down, anyway, hitting the floor while the audience breaks up around them. Heads back to the bar or the bathrooms, or just starts to dance as music starts up over the stereo system.

All bravado now, she walks fucking towards him, meets him on the dance floor maybe five feet from the base of the stage. There's no joy in the slash of her smile across her face. Just an edgy, churning mix of awareness, fear, wariness and wrapped with a liminal sort of aggression that is bright as she is.

"Yeah well." That slashing smile, crisp as a blade. He's dressed conservatively, in black and red. She's wearing a black-and-pink... bustier. Bra, really, the cups covered in tiny pink roses, a short denim-and-leather skirt held together by safety pins, and her usual fishnets and platform-lifted boots. "Haven't had time to practice lately, so we open with the practice and finish with the show.

"Doesn't seem like your kinda place, though." A glance around the room. "You're really slumming it, aren't you?"

She lifts the bottle to him, an elegant, negligent curl of her wrist. "Wanna drink?"

Serafíne

(BRB)

Entropy

There was a soft laugh at her assertion. That this wasn't his kind of place. And what was his kind of place, exactly? Where did men like Brogan spend their evenings off? Pan could more than likely venture a guess, after what he'd seen the other night. But maybe it wasn't quite so dramatic as all that.

"I think a few things about me might surprise you," he offered cryptically. But when she offered him a sip of her drink, he shook his head. "Alcohol pollutes the body."

There had to be some kind of special irony reserved for phrases like that coming from people like him.

"But I like music, and I like the crowd." He smiled at her swaying figure, leaning forward to speak low beneath the thrum of the music. "I also like to dance. If you can spare some time for an old man."

Serafíne

"Does it?" returns Sera, with an exaggerated sort of gleam to her voice. If she weren't already drunk she could well just be frightened of him right now, stiff and stark with her fear. But she does not want to be and cannot afford to be and anyway she's drunk; the fight-or-flight boost of adrenalin is spiking into her blood and even though there's a stark new pallor to her skin up close, a rapid, thready pulse beneath her skin, the kicked up hammering of her heart beneath her sternum, she's also so fucking alive. "I've never found that to be the case."

And (fuck John Brogan) lifts the bottle by the neck to her mouth and takes another very deliberate draught. "Oh well. Too bad for you." The tight little slash of her half-smile crawls wider. "And more for me."

Her eyes are glassy from intoxication, but steady on him beneath that. Nothing about her is easy tonight. When he smiles at her; when he leans in close he can see the stiffness beneath her lean energy. It comes in stuttersteps, as if she were lit by a strobe. In compacted little units: his smile just arrests her for a fractional second. Then, his voice, close beneath her ear stills her again for just as long as it takes her heart to beat again.

There's something stark and even prideful about her bare shoulders as she absorbs the suggestion, the invitation to dance with him like a blow. Absorbs it and swallows it and digests it all in three or four heartbeats.

Her eyes on his face, like the reflection of someone in a distant window. Like the memory of the reflection of someone in a distant window, on a dark, dark night.

"Why the fuck not."

Sera throws the words back at him, opens her arms and steps in close.

Serafíne

Perception + Awareness-as-empathy on Brogan +1 dif for being drunk.

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 6 )

Entropy

[Manip+Sub (specialty applies)]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 2

Entropy

[Actually, while we're on the subject of dice rolls... Aura Scan?]

Dice: 4 d10 TN3 (3, 4, 5, 8) ( success x 4 )

Entropy

For all the potential harm this man may have been capable of, his motivations had so far proved a troubling mystery. He was as difficult to read as Serafine was adept at reading, but... there was this. His smile when she accepted his offer. The way it made his eyes light up. A true smile - not a thing of schooled precision. Pleased. There didn't seem to be a hint of aggression within him tonight. If anything, he seemed relaxed. But there was something unnerving about both his pleasure and his relaxed confidence. One could not help but feel it, knowing what he was.

His body didn't have the alert readiness of a predator about to attack its prey. That didn't make him any less frightening to be around. The unknown threat was sometimes worse than the known one.

What was it they said about dancing with the devil?

Serafine stepped close, either because of hubris or because she didn't think she had a choice or because she knew that a few extra inches probably wouldn't matter if he wanted to hurt her. (A few extra miles probably wouldn't matter.) Brogan danced with the same relaxed and graceful ease with which he moved, but he was also restrained. Like a preternatural shark, indeed. Despite their proximity, he didn't make an attempt to touch her.

"You're afraid," he said. The way one might casually observe that a friend had just cut their hair or bought a new pair of shoes. "So why haven't you run away?"

Serafíne

And Serafíne does step close. Close enough that she can read his body language without having to take in the whole of his face. Close enough that if she wanted to look right at him, she could only take his features in in piece. This eye or that corner of his mouth. The cut of his brow or the slide of his cheek against the darkness.

Close enough that he can smell the sweat on her skin. The alcohol on her breath and wafting up from her bottles. The spent cigarettes she smoked before the band took the stage, an hour and a fucking half ago.

Her head is down now; she's watching the space between the bodies. His feet and her own and their twined together shadows and the shadows of the other people who came out here to hear a live band on a Wednesday night, and get pleasantly drunk or pleasantly high or both or just get fucked up.

Usually when she's in a crowd or in front of a crowd she feels like she's entirely part of it; feels off the energy, the vibe, the way he feeds on -

- well, she doesn't know what he feeds on.

That makes her heart beat faster.

She bites her lip; sharply enough to draw blood. Lets the spike of pain slice through her awareness and pull her every minutely outside her body, back into the slipstream.

She thinks about his question. Genuinely thinks about it, a spot of blood trickling to mingle with the scarlet lipstick smeared across her mouth. He can see her thinking about it. Pulling it inside her drunken mind and turning it over like a stone, to see what's underneath. To see what crawls away from the light.

"Is that what you want me to do?" she returns at last, her gaze flashing up to meet his eyes, shadowed by dark, mascara-coated lashes. There is a sort of fuck-you challenge inherent in the look. Her voice is quiet, though. " - run away? Or is this better for you.

"See, I just don't see what the fuck good it would do me.

"Either way, when you walked in that door, I was pinned.

"Like a butterfly in a book."

Serafíne

Prime 1: Watching the Weaving. Dif 4 -1 specialty focus.

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

Bravado? WP

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 5, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Entropy

Serafine opened up her senses, and she'd see the faintest shadow of his own effects ringing his head like a dark halo. The working of his Will, cloaking his resonance and gleaning the details of her projected emotions. It was nothing she was not herself familiar with, but on him the threads were wrong somehow - woven backwards.

That was all she would find though. And the fact that she found anything at all was indication enough of his lack of concern. Anyone of his level of mastery would be capable of frightening subtlety, if they wished it.

He laughed, like he found her amusing. There was a fondness to the sound, but it could never be called warm. Nothing about this man could ever be mistaken for warm. (Burning, perhaps. Impassioned. Dangerous. But not warm.)

"I don't want you to run away. But I won't stop you if you do. You are, as you put it, free to fly away." He stopped dancing for a moment, his tall frame still amid the moving crowd. "I think there's a part of you that wants to stay. Maybe that scares you even more. But you shouldn't be afraid. Wary - but not afraid. Fear is a useless emotion." He reached out toward her carefully to run the edge of his thumb over her lip, catching that drop of blood.

"I see so much more in you than what you think I see. You're not like the others. Some of them are strong, but you could be limitless. Because you understand things that they don't. The only thing holding you back is your fear."

He put his thumb to his mouth and licked the red streak of blood from his skin, never taking his eyes off of her.

Serafíne

Whatever streak of stubborn bravado causes Sera to stand stiff and still and stubbornly straight-spined as he reaches out to run his thumb across her mouth is not enough to suppress the faint shudder that runs down her body when he does touch her. It is bone-deep, that movement, and radiant, slowly as it opens like the expanding waves of energy released by the slippage of some crack, some fault in the earth.

It is harder now for her to look at him; he never takes he eyes from her, but she takes him in in pieces. Glancing up to find his eyes steady on her, then dropping her gaze between them just as quickly. Her hand tightens around the neck of her whiskey bottle, but she asn't taken another shot, not since the first one she threw back when he refused her offer, and unless he has started moving again, she, too, slows, then stops.

Stands still and alone with him in the center of the moving crowd. "Is that why you're here?" she looks up sharply at him, then. " - to show me how to lose my fear and find some new path forward?"

She looks up, then. Meets his gaze with a raw, open, animal directness.

"What is it you think I understand, John?" Between questions, Sera swallows hard. She's feeding on her own fear just as she fed on her own pain, used it to push herself just beyond the shroud of her skin; just enough to see the faint crown of his Work, which he allows her to see. "That none of the others do?

"I'd like to know. I'd like you to tell me."

Entropy

[Sound buffer]

Dice: 4 d10 TN3 (4, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Entropy

She avoided looking at him right up until that moment when her focus sharpened and her strength coiled within her in a shock of willful energy. And then she asked her question, and this time the man did not laugh. His eyes pulled their focus away from her long enough to slide shut as he whispered something she could not hear, but that sent a cold shiver up her spine all the same. The threads of his Will formed around them, and within a moment the din of the music faded away, along with the shouts and scuffle of the crowd.

They were all still there, but it was like the rest of the world was on the other side of a glass box.

"Pain," he said simply. "Not what it feels like, but what it means. And yes, I can show you how to lose your fear. If you want to.

"I can show you the things you locked away. The things you're afraid to remember. I can give you back all of it, Serafine. The question is, are you strong enough to look?"

Serafíne

That cold shiver crawls up her spine with his whispered words; Sera cannot suppress her reaction and does not bother to try. Once again she shivers, pulling her shoulders back as the sensation runs up the column of her spine, from somewhere in the center of her back through her neck, expanding outward through her stark, stiff shoulders. The cut of her clavicles like blades slicing beneath her skin.

Then the noise recedes, the music, all of it. There's a certain wildness to her eyes as she pulls her gaze from his and looks aslant, takes in the sensation of people moving all around them, without, silent and therefore distant.

She just stands there, in profile, her vaguely glazed eyes drifting over the people who are moving noiselessly all around them. Some are drunk; others are half-sober. Some are giving themselves over to the moment, others are holding back, looking around, wondering if someone's watching them and judging the way they move. There's a girl at the edge of the crowd who has had too much to drink and is just starting to retch. One of her friends shouts and reaches out to hustle her to the bathroom before she vomits on the dance floor.

Sera hears none of this. She's turned to the left; her hair loose and damp from her sweat against her left cheek. The buzzed line on her right darker than the long blond curls that cover the rest of her head.

While she's studying them, she lifts back the bottle of whiskey and takes another drink. Feels the sock and burn at the back of her throat; welcomes it as it slides down into her gut. A little less focused, now. Smiling around the mouth of the bottle - almost bemused above the turmoil, the fear, the hunger, the raw animal panic his suggestion engenders in her.

"Let's play a game," she tells him, her words a little more slurred, now. Her focus no longer on his face, but drifting down his tall, lean frame. "You get three guesses."

The slice of her smile is as raw as her emotions. As cutting-deep.

"What do you think I'm going to say."

Serafíne

Time 2: trying to scry the future, looking for maaaybe his next moves. More concerned about her friends than herself here. Difficulty 5 -1 for specialty focus. Can I get another -1 for visceral?

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (2, 8) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Entropy

[Per+Awareness]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Entropy

[Countermagic]

Dice: 4 d10 TN8 (3, 5, 6, 9) ( success x 1 )

Serafíne

Extending Difficult 5+1 = 6 -1 for focus, -2? for merit

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (1, 9) ( success x 1 )

Entropy

[Continuing to counter]

Dice: 4 d10 TN8 (1, 5, 10, 10) ( success x 2 )

Entropy

There was a reason why this man had come here tonight. A reason why he was making this offer to her and not to Jim or the Priest or any of the others. Part of that reason was evidenced by the fact that she stood there in front of him and did not run. That she spoke back to him willfully, despite the growing panic and the shame and all of the other emotions his presence engendered in her. That she dared to try to read his future.

But tonight, her vision was struck blind by the force of a more powerful Will. She would experience the same frustration that Pan had when he'd attempted something similar, but thankfully not the same punishment.

Brogan smirked. "I think it doesn't matter what people say. What matters is what they believe."

Suddenly the wall of silence around them fell, and Serafine would find herself plunged back into the immediacy of their environment.

"If you want to talk, your friend the priest knows where to find me. But come alone, or the next time I won't be as friendly."

Over the speakers, the song changed, blending into something down-tempo to wind down the night. John turned away and threaded back through the dancers, and unless Serafine chose to follow, a moment later he'd be gone.

Serafíne

Sera closes her eyes; grits her teeth firmly against the frustration of his countermanding Will. Stands there are sound returns and the noise of the crowd resumes all around her. A sharp glance back over her shoulder at the stage is enough to assure her that the band is gone. Packed up and snuck out the back, not that any of that matters when he can hide himself from her senses and wreath himself in a dampened sort of darkness.

Then she spins again, finds the back of his head in the crowd and pushes through them, following his wake like some opportunistic predator in the shadow of a larger, more dangerous Thing. Follows him to the edge of the dance floor, though no further, just watching him to assure herself that he's gone.

Then and only then does she lose her grip on the bottle of whiskey. The neck slides through her nerveless fingers.

The bottle shatters on the dance floor.

Sera does not hear it. Does not even seem to notice its gone.

Clean.

Pan

Out in the darkness he could conceal his weariness and his stripped-bare rawness because the blood was dark and looked as if buckets soaked into his shirt. None on his face or hands meant nothing. He walks up the steps and into the cabin and there in the light the toll of his encounter with the Nephandus comes on slow like the electric pink of the sky as the sun rises in the morning before the world below it does.

His body was healed. He did not tell them how he didn't black out, not really, how he lost consciousness from the force of the blow and came to choking on his own blood. Told them he would have died if Annie weren't there. Everything he said tonight was true but his eyes didn't blink and he did not embrace Sera when she wrapped an arm around him.

Now he stands in the center of the cabin. It is not unfamiliar to him. He has been here before, once, and he knows which room Leah sleeps in and he knows if he went out to the truck and came back and put a bullet between her eyes before she opened them that would not solve everything.

It would solve one thing but not everything.

He's standing there when Sera trails in after him and when he hears the door whine open he snaps out of whatever place the solitude brought him to and moves into the bathroom. Doesn't turn on the light and doesn't think she'll follow him in there. He ought to know her better than that.

If she comes to see what the hell he's doing: he's sat on the edge of the bathtub in the outfit he would have died in, elbows on his knees, everything in the bathroom off, his brow rested in the heels of his hands. The posture of one praying for succor but if he prays he does it silently. More like he sat down to take off his boots and exhaustion claimed him and he thought he was alone enough to let it.

Serafíne

He ought to know her better than that.

There are scrapes and thumps in the cabin outside. The lights are on from where Jim turned them on, except for the bathroom, Leah's room, and another of the spare bedrooms. Pan is in the darkness, sitting on the edge of the porcelain bathtub, head in the heels of his hands. Outside: the (by now familiar) thud-thud of Sera removing her boots. She heel-toes them off just inside the door, leaves them piled on a rubber mat and pads across the hardwoods through the kitchen to the fridge. The soft slap of her fishnet-clad feet on the hardwoods heralds her movement around the place. And the quiet, thoughtless hum of her voice, some background and half-remembered song.

He thinks he is alone and that she will leave him alone. And she does; for a time. Glances at him when she steps into the cabin, an alertness wreathing about her. She's high, yes. But she's not fucked up. She's tuned in to the pattern all around them, hooked into the stream, aware of the beating of his heart. And Leah's. Jim's and Sid's rabbit-fast outside. The bats swooping low in the darkness overhead and the raccoon eyeing their trash and the slow-deep-beat of life in the trees and scrub all around the cabin.

So, she glances at him standing in the center of the room and then away as he walks off toward the bathroom without looking back at her. Busies herself taking off her shoes, padding to the fridge. Glancing outside at the ring of firelight where Sid and Jim are. Stands at the window by the sink just looking and and listening and being still. Waiting for the familiar beat of water against porcelain from the bathroom. Listening for it, really.

He has a few minutes alone, then. Long enough to strip off his clothes and turn on the water and step beneath the shower and let the day drain away. But he doesn't turn on the water and there's no sound from the bathroom. Just the beat of his heart against her senses. The lingering resonance of the Work he had performed. And the Work that had been done to him.

--

The bathroom door opens, then. That slice of light beneath the door expands and contracts and her slender shadow darkens it as she peeks, then slips in. Sera closes the door behind her with a firm but gentle pressure and gives herself a moment for her eyes to adjust to the sudden lack-of-light.

She smells of clove cigarettes and hashish and smoke from Jim's fire. Chanel No. 5 and the nightwind. And her Work: the animal immediacy of it, so close to her skin.

Sera slips by Pan. Pauses just in front of him and bends over, quite nearly placing a kiss on the crown of his bent head. She stops short, though, studying him in the darkness through half-lashed eyes. Stands there, close in her own aspect of prayer or benediction, then slips past. Sets a bottled protein shake from some organic juice bar down in Denver, which is still damp from the ice in her cooler, on the bathroom beside him and a bottle of Gatorade on the sink in front of him. Then folds her small frame into the space between the bathtub and the sink, just beside him, sitting first on her knees, then curling back until she's cross-legged at his feet and looking up at him in the darkness.

She says nothing, nothing at all, Sera.

Just reaches out and starts unlacing his boots.

Pan

He sits in the dark to fill the cracks in his armor with the words he knows by heart and the truth that did not fall away from him with the assault from the Fallen. His scripture is silent but she knows from the stillness in him that he is praying. His breathing is steady enough that she might mistake him for sleeping. As she slept she was not aware of the cadence of his respirations.

All she has seen of him is that he does not judge and he does not give in to strong emotion. He feels emotion but it does not rule him. He is calm and even outside he was calm but it was an Old Testament sort of calm. Like if anything had come out of the woods meant to harm Sera or Jim or Sid he would have stricken down that thing. Nothing he could do from a distance and he knows that now. He knows that he transgressed.

Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.

At the thump of the bottle on the sink, on the tub beside him, he breathes deep and pulls his hands away from his face. The Cultist is at his feet and he can smell the hashish around her and his eyes are still wide in the dark but they are not wild. Maybe it was the fire made them wild, stood to close to it after whatever happened to him.

"Sera--" he starts to say but then stops himself. For what is comfort in a time of crisis but a helper sent by the Lord? Who is he to push her aside? Pride landed him here and pride will keep him here.

He wears cowboy boots without laces. His jeans conceal the hides of them and they run up his calves beneath the denim. They slip off with some coaxing. He lifts one foot and then the other. He runs both hands through his hair and holds it back off his face a moment.

"--thank you. I'm alright now."

Pan

Prayer. She sensed that he was praying and that is what stopped her from planting that kiss on the crown of his head. That kiss is a sort of prayer for her; every morning she wakes up in her own bed and slips down the stairs and finds her housemates groggy over coffee and donuts or last night's pizza and sushi or cornflakes with whiskey or what the fuck every they might be eating, she greets them each like that. Slipped behind them, a kiss on the crown of the head, a quiet, sleepy hug from behind. Dahlia and Rick and Dan, all of them. Whoever they might've brought him, too. Whomsoever they're sleeping with, whoever crashed overnight, in the spare room or on the couch or on the cabana bed out in the back garden, where she opens up the curtains to look at the stars and the garden in darkness when she wants to smoke what she wants to smoke, and where she closes the curtains and the blinds when she sleeps with whomever she wishes to sleep with.

Now she's at his feet, not precisely looking up at him. Running her hands beneath the hem of his jeans for leverage to pull off his cowboy boots. Accepting the help he gives her and shifting them off then putting them aside, beside the sink, where neither of them will trip.

Jesus washed the feet of his disciples before he was crucified. One by one by one. Laid down their objections, one by one by one. Sera was raised Catholic; she knows the rite but the resonance is so distant for her, so shrouded by history and her lack of belief that she may not see any of these parallels. Pan, though. He knows the scriptures by heart. The Old and the New.

"Yeah, well," she's still looking down, the crown of her head golden in the dim light. "You might not be after you try that protein shake. It's beet juice and banana and wheatgrass and chia seeds and almond butter. So."

She's after his socks now; pulling down the shafts, which are stiff with blood in places. With his blood, which makes her feel stricken when she thinks of it and all she's drawn him into. So she doesn't think about it.

Just pulls the shaft of his left sock down over his rough heel, nevermind the blood and dried sweat, the humid, human smell of feet encased in thick leather in summer. Lightly as she speaks, there's a sort of visceral undercurrent to her words, some glottal passion inflecting her tone. (Dear Padre: if you had died on me, I would have murdered you.)

"Best I make sure you fucking survive that too."

Pan

He helps her with the socks beyond lifting his heels off the bathmat. As if the intimacy involved in touching the fabric closest to the skin and the sweat goes beyond the shucking of his blood-soaked shirt to look for injuries. Rough thumbs peel away the dark cotton and he tucks them into the boots where she's pushed them out of the way.

And he knows or suspects she is not going to stop at his feet. She opened him up outside in the dark and he does not wait for her to rise so she can do it again. The priest starts to unbutton his shirt again and nearer now, calmer, she can see the blood has dried and he has already tried, hours ago, to rinse it clean but the water wouldn't take it. Some of the plasma rinsed away and took a degree of stiffness with it but the hemoglobin stays behind, stains the fabric so it will never come out. He'll have to throw away the shirt.

"What, am I supposed to drink it? Sounds like the lawn care aisle at the hardware store."

A joke. A touch of light as they sit in the dark and return him to rights. It does not have that self-aware quality that load his jokes on any other day. In the kitchen at the rectory the other morning - Nice place you've got here - it was wry, like he knew she knew he formed the sentence with the intent to be funny. Diffusion. It was a sentence with purpose.

This is a different sort of joke. The words just fall out now that she's seen him slapped back down to Earth like an angel with its wings half hacked off. Vulnerable don't have to mean weak. Just means he's human.

He's accepted this of her about a dozen times already.

Serafíne

He forestalls her rising by reaching up to unbutton his blood-stained shirt himself. She sits still at his feet, her hip against the cool porcelain of the tub, legs tucked neatly beneath her. Not necessarily looking at him but fully aware of his presence, of the space he takes up. The bulk of his body; the scent of his blood and sweat in the air. Aware of these things and also: the quiet of the house, the rhythm of Leah's breathing, the brightness of the light out in the hallways, the scruffle of some blind dark thing beneath the earth, the coyote slinking away from the fire through the trees.

Perfectly quiet and strangely, finely still, her eyes averted as he finished unbuttoning the shirt and reaches up to strip it off his shoulders. She's shifted position in the interim and grabbed that bottle of protein shake, so she doesn't disloge it from the edge of the tub. It is cold and slick in her hand, so she rests it against a knee she draws up as she sits back with her spine against the bathtub in companionable silence.

When he is done and is pulling the shirt off his second arm she half-turns, reaches up thoughtlessly and nearly blindly to take the shirt from his hand and bundle it up and stuff it into the trash.

Sera replaces the bloodied shirt with the protein shake, her head canted to show the stark line of her jaw, pale in the darkness, her eyes shaded above it. "Yeah, you're supposed to drink it. I hear it's good for you.

"What can I say?" she continues, takes up the thread of the joke that falls out of him, the edge of a tempered half-smile slicing through her tone. "Jim's a fucking hippie - " All affection, in those words, a deep and resonant fondness. " - loves that shit.

"Don't worry though, I bought Gatorade too if you prefer to get your electrolytes the way the Coca-Cola company intended."

While he's trying - or refusing to try - the protein shake, Sera opens the cabinet beneath the sink with her toes, then shifts forward, searches blindly until she finds a clean washcloth and a clean towel. Sets both on the sink within reach, hers or his own, then cuts her gaze back to him, looking at him for the first time, really, with the shirt stripped off. Studying the pattern of the blood dried on his skin. Trying not to allow herself to understand just how much he shed.

Because that would hurt.

Pan

The body underneath his clothing has gone soft with time. His skin is dark by virtue of genetics and time spent in the sun but it is losing its elasticity. As a young man he would have had effortless strength and an athleticism inherent in his build. Maybe he played basketball as a teenager, before he flipped whatever switch revealed itself to be The One that forever locked the addict to his substance. Now he has the powerful arms and torso of a man who can still lift his own weight, who can swing an axe and hoist an engine block and carry other people's children around, but his own weight is more than what his doctor would like it to be.

With the lights off she can't see the scars on the insides of his elbows. He has one short faint white line on his lower back, over a kidney, but no other testaments to the violence of their existence lingers on his flesh.

He cleaned the blood from his face and his chest and the shirt still tells of it. But he doesn't.

He reaches for the protein shake and frowns at it before breaking the seal to open it.

"Got plenty of electrolytes," he says. "My thanks to Coca-Cola all the same."

Serafíne

"Stop." Quiet, to him, as he starts unsealing the protein shake. She forestalls him opening it by reaching out and tapping the lid. Tells him: "You gotta shake it first or it'll be all settled and grainy."

Doesn't tell him: it'll probably still be grainy.

Then her hand drops away and she instead sets the heel of her palm on the edge of the tub beside him, using the leverage to lift herself from the floor to perch on the lip of the tub as well.

Sera is looking away from him, down at the floor; the dark shadows in the room. She does not need to see him to know where he is, and there's something careful about the way she both studies him through a scrim of lashes; notes that he has cleaned away the blood, that he is whole; and then cuts her gaze deliberately away from him, giving him back some measure of privacy in the darkness.

"I'm really sorry I brought Sid out here," Sera confesses, hands to herself, elbows on her fishnet-clad thighs, her voice low. Pan can hear her concern there, her regret; and also something sharper in the tone. She's more than sorry; she made a choice she should not have made and it is a sharp one. It is not just that the Orphan is in danger here. Her presence heightens the danger for the rest of them. Sid is afraid of Jim's shadow. Jim is the most chill person Sera knows. The Nephandi would tear her apart.

It is not just a confession; it is an implicit apology to Pan for involving another fucking helpless magelet in this situation Sera has somehow authored for him. Let me help.

Right now; here and now, Sera keeps her arms and torso and thighs to herself. They are close enough that she could skim against his body with her own. If he were Jim, she would. Or Dan or Dahlia or even Rick; or possibly if he were a stranger, sitting beside her in the dark, whole but covered with what was almost his life's blood.

Her elbow are on her thighs, her hands clasped between her legs. She's looking downward. She's to his right so the curtain of her hair tangles with and obscures the most starkly delicate parts of her profile - the jointure of neck and the hollow of her jaw, the curve of her ear, the sweep of tendons attaching her skull to her spine and clavicle.

"I'll talk to Jim. We should do another divination. The future, here. The next few days. See if they're planning to come here. I don't know if he's willing to fight, Padre. I think he may have given up violence when he - " they all have pasts. Jim gave up violence and took up drugs. Pan gave up drugs and took up a sort of holy violence. " - but maybe he can help Leah."

Keep her anchored. Keep her safe. Keep her her. Sera has never given up her faith that the girl could somehow be healed, made human if not whole. She doesn't now, even so.

There's fear in her voice; for him and the rest of them, but she is still quiet and steady and alert to their circumstances. Bravery is never about the lack of fear, so much as facing it.

"I haven't, though. I'm not strong but I'm not helpless." This is all in profile to him, her eyes down, her voice low and even. "I can use a gun. We have two 9 millimeter pistols back at the house. I'm not great. But - " a short little shrug. " - and I used to fence. Sabre more than foil or epée. So, I'm not helpless.

"And I will fight. For her and you and them."

Here she glances up, cuts a look to him in the darkness, the edge of her familiar smile lifting one corner of her mouth.

"And for me."

--

She's rocking forward to stand. To give him back his privacy. He probably wants a shower and does not want her to join him, but she stops as she's leaning back; touches his spine, between his shoulder blades. Her fingers are cool and damp from the cold water beading on the bottle of protein shake. Dried blood flakes off when she pulls them away.

Sera sighs out; a long, ragged breath. He can feel her beside him; shaking just a bit at the thought of what he endured. Though he does not tell her and she does not press him and she does not know and will likley never know the whole of it. There's a moment, just a moment, when she finds blood on his skin rather than just his clothing where she's undone by it.

"I'm gonna wash your back, okay." It isn't really a question; she's just telling him, quietly and surely as one would inform a sick child, what she's going to do. "Then I'll get out of here so you can grab a shower."

Pan

Other than a huff of a laugh at her instruction to shake the stuff before he imbibes it and the sussuration of Grace given before he drinks the stuff that makes him grimace with the liquid heft of it he is largely silent as he drinks. As he sits beside her in the dark and looks ahead just as she does. His magick is a terminated thing after earlier but the illuminating quality of his Working still weeps for the oily corruption that beat it back.

The water in the shower cannot sluice deep or hot enough to cleanse him of the knowledge that that thing was inside of his head and it dragged him down from whence it came. He has slept alone without consequence for decades, more, and he is not truly alone because the Lord watches him and keeps him. But he asked the Lord for sight and the sight will not go from him as he sleeps. Even as he sits here far from sleep now he knows this.

So he drinks the shake though it makes him grimace. He listens to the Cultist apologize and speak of the miracle they would like to perform. He shakes his head No at the notion of helping Leah but he does not voice it. It's futile. Improbable but not impossible. He wants to believe but for all the fantasy he takes as truth he is a pragmatist.

He is big and gentle with people but Nephandi are not people. They're demons. Demons cannot be redeemed. It's like asking a pile of ash to rise up from itself and return to the business of being a tree. Twisted Avatars do not return. Gilgul is the only hope for her and none of them know the Rite. The Masters have all fled this plane.

But Sera is going to fight.

Pan puts the cap back on the protein shake and sets it on the edge of the sink and wraps his arm around her shoulders. She can hear the breath rush into his lungs and come back out again in a sigh. His skin is warm and the muscle beneath the skin is hard. She can feel the solidness of his bones but not the articulation of them. Nothing about him is thin or frail and yet he bled tonight.

She remembers this when she brushes her fingers between his shoulder blades. The priest frowns at the placement of the blood, some thin memory coming back to him. She says she's going to wash his back and he shakes his head again. Slow for the exhaustion oozing into his bones again.

"That isn't necessary, Sera," he says.

Serafíne

Pan wraps his arm around her shoulders, Serafíne breathes out another long, slow breath, and slides an inch and a half closer to him, tucking her body against his solid frame. Just, sits there quietly for a moment, her eyes half-closed, her own arm wedged between them (she has not returned the gesture), left shoulder curved forward, the right one back. Tension in her body, though no match for whatever tension remains in his.

Tonight, it was the priest who had the vision of hell, not the seer.

Sera tips her head aslant, until her left temple comes to rest on the solid knot of his deltoid muscle, cushioned by the wreathing weight of her long hair, which spills across his arm and down his chest. Pan has a spare tire, not a six pack. Serafíne doesn't fucking care.

Right now, really, all she cares about is that he is okay.

She moves her head a few times until the hollow of her bones match the curve of his muscle and is then still. If he looked at her aslant, he would see that her eyes are half-closed, and focused off into the middle distance.

He tells her that that isn't necessary.

She half-smiles. He can feel the curve of her cheek against his chest, the taut articulation of her scapulae like amputated wings, just as she can feel the solid weight of his solid arm settled around her shoulders.

Jesus allowed a woman to wash his feet with her tears and dry them with her hair.

"I know," she murmurs back, almost drowsily, though here her gaze flicks back at his profile and he can feel if not see the questioning arc of her brows. "But you can't reach and I want to.

"If it's alright."

Pan

If it's alright.

He laughs that silent laugh that shows his teeth and shaved the leathered heavy years off his face. Reaches up with the hand not clasped about her shoulder to scrub at the half of his brow obscured from her and the laugh fades, takes the smile with it.

"It's alright," he says.

He takes his arm off her shoulders so she can move. Hoists himself up off the edge of the tub so he can turn on the vanity light over the mirror. Squints at the ferocity of it after so long in the dark. With the light washed low over them she can see the blood smeared down the space between the blades closer to the left where it dripped down and caught and fought with his shirt.

As he stands Pan puts his palms flat on the sink and she can see as he stands that the stonewash of his jeans does little to hide the blood that poured onto his thighs and dried there. The trajectory of it suggested the collar and the space above his sternum caught most of it. His right wrist was stained front and back. Fewer splatters made it to his midsection. Below the knee he is clean. Underneath the shirt he is clean. All that remains is that errant smear of oxidized red where he can't reach.

Without another word he picks up the washcloth and runs the tap to wet it. Turns off the tap again and squeezes out the excess water. He hands it to her and he can't see her for his form blocking hers in the mirror.

Serafíne

She's behind him. He cannot see her but her can hear her rising after he does. She's young and slender and fluid. She doesn't wince when she rises from a crouch. None of the joints in her body pop or crackle when she moves. Whatever wounds have scarred her seem to be the sort no one can see with their eyes.

Few people look beyond that.

So: it is the whisper of movement; her hair over her shoulders, her t-shirt against her torso, her feet on the cold tiled floor. The quiet music of a pair of bracelets sliding down her wrst as he reaches to take the wet washcloth from his hands.

She would have waited until the water was warmer.

"Soap," Serafíne prompts him, with an elbow or something in his right flank. There's laughter in her voice, which is quiet and almost prim, that note of admonishment beneath or over it twinned with her bemusement. So he hands her the soap, which is decorative and shaped like a shell and she scrubs some into the washcloth open in her hand, then slips it back to him, to return to its holder. Her bare arms warm over his bare flank. Only the metal bite of her two bracelets is cool, and then only if they hit him just so. Left hand against his lower back for leverage, she reaches over the curve of his bent and solid spine to scrub away the blood. She is humming beneath her breath, as she sometimes does, and the sound is dreaming, is sweetly meditative. Is mediated by the movement of the chambers of her heart, low and quiet and insistent, except for the upward lilt of the chorus, which rises a minor fifth, like a winged thing caught in an updraft. Like a hope or a prayer.

"He was in your head, wasn't he." She says, somewhere in there, as she works. No accusation, no demand of confession or confidence, just understanding, just quiet speculation. just a meditative sort of empathy. He's been in Sera's head for weeks, perhaps since that first prophetic dream, and Pan knows that better than anyone.

There's a rhythm here. She scrubs; hands the washcloth back to him, with directions to "Rinse," or "Let the water get warmer, would you," then takes it back from his hand continues, moving first up his spine, across his shoulders and upper back; and then down. The pressure is firm, but not quite brusque.

This continues well after the blood has been scrubbed away. When she finally says, "There." and hands him back the washcloth for good, she has scrubbed his back from his shoulders to the waist of his jeans.

If he were another man she would kiss him on the fifth thoracic vertebrae. Slide her arms around his waist and inhale his scent. But he is not another man, and these things do not happen when her work is finished.

She just steps back so he can straighten and step back too. Though she watches him, this time without shying from her want to see him.

"I'm glad you're okay."

Pan

So close to the stream they could have rinsed the blood from his back from the water flowing down out of the mountains. It would be cold enough to burn but the washcloth in Sera's hand is not much warmer. The priest has locked his elbows where he holds himself still against the sink. Blots out Sera entirely. She cannot see his face and he has nothing but the warmth of her arm and the unwavering task of.

Minute bumps rise where the cold water hits his flesh and a chill courses through the muscles in his shoulders and arms but he does not complain. A knob of cervical spine pushes against the skin when he bows his head. Like a horse put up for the night he could fall asleep while she scrubs away the lather of the day. He could have fallen asleep sat there in the dark praying on his transgression though he had already accepted his punishment.

When the cloth comes back to him he wrings it out with a hand that bears no jewelry and rests it beside the shell-shaped novelty soap. His ribs rise and fall with his respirations. The vanity light shows the fishbelly-white sliver of scar tissue over his right flank. It was stitched closed once. The scar is wide but not long, old but in fading grown prominent against the dark of his skin.

If she gets the impression she is one of the few people to have ever seen the scar the impression would not be inaccurate. No one in his congregation has ever seen his back bare.

He does not straighten or step back. Does not lift up his head. He lifts his eyes so they can glimpse each other in the mirror and she can see the corner of them crinkle when he smiles. But he doesn't say anything and he doesn't turn around.

Serafíne

Sera meets his gaze in the mirror. Her own eyes are blue and bluer in the stark brilliance of the vanity light than they often seem. The faintest crinkling there, his smile returned in reflection.

"You should call Rafael." He can hear slip a hand into the tight back pocket of her denim cut-offs. The clink of bracelets, the slick-slide of her bare feet on the tiled floor. "When was the last time you guys talked?" The question is rhetorical, barely lilting upward at the end. Her smile is half-hooked, but she's already retreating: he can hear that too. Hear her turn around, see perhaps the sweet of her hair down her spine, her hand on the door in reflection, or in his periphery.

"I'll leave my phone on the counter by the fridge for you, if you wanna borrow it."

Then the door's swinging open, and she's slipping out, as surely as she slipped in.

By the time he finishes his shower, she's already cleaning his blood up from the passenger's seat in his truck. The floor mats will have to be replaced, though. The stains there will never come out.