Avon Calling, or maybe a Sera

Serafíne

It is a cold Tuesday afternoon. Clouds crowd the horizon and the sharp promise of snow is vibrant in the air, damp and cold and faintly metallic. The highest peaks already have their snowcover for the winter, the fourteeners, some of which are visible from the gardens and greenhouse surrounding Kat's homestead, which in turn is some unidentifiable distance from Denver proper. Except for some cold-hardy vegetables like cabbage, broccoli, spinach, and kale growing in a few high-tunnels, the gardens are largely dormant. Here and there the bright brush of color from mums or panises, planted now to survive the winter and bloom again come spring, but mostly: sere, dry, autumn in the high plains. Tropicals - if she raises them - have been shifted into the greenhouses. Favored specimans, kept warm and damp in the humid interior, which will be a vibrant contrast when the ankle deep, knee deep, perhaps hip-deep snows promised by that back-of-the-throat tang finally fall.

Maybe he loses track of time. Without the daily rhythms of the parish to define his day. Without the seven a.m. mass and the eight a.m. stations of the cross and the League of Mary luncheons every Monday and on and on, the two a.m. phone calls and the funerals and the blessings of the dead and the newly born and the dying and the diseased and the criminals and the victims: all of them, children of his dying and resurrected God.

There is a different sort of rhythm to life out here. Dawn and dusk rule. The sun rises and it sets and they hardly notice the changing of the clocks because the clocks do not precisely matter when you are ruled by earth and sky.

Sera does not think to call ahead but Dan is rather more thoughtful than she. So there's warning, an hour or two or three, before the old Jeep crunches up the graveled drive, Dan driving, Sera leaning with her forehead against the glass of the passenger's window, her eyes half-closed, her senses open.

She can feel his presence all the way up the drive.

--

The car stops. They both slide out but listen: Dan's jogging around the front of the Jeep trying to get to Sera's side of the car before she quite has the door open, to catch her as she slips out. He doesn't make it. Her recovery is not complete but is nearly so. The bright, cold air makes her cough and there are still tiny, tidy little spots of blood in her spittle when she coughs, and she looks

so

frighteningly

thin,

but her hair is washed and curled and dried and even dyed again, bright golden creamy blonde down almost but not-quite to the dark roots. Already peeling polish on her short nails, and an oversized leather coat over a dark hoodie over an old concert t-shirt over black jeans and knee-high, low-heeled black boots, the layers concealing most of her frame.

The wind catches her hair, peels it away from her face. She breathes it in sharply and - shaking off Dan's assistance, his insistance - follows that feeling until she finds the priest, whereever he may be.

Pan

The only task he's had these past two months is learning how to get by after his god almost called him home.

Convalescing is hard work and he has done so beyond the reach of anyone but the Verbena who drew him up out of oblivion. Were not for her Francisco Echeverría would have lain in that hospital bed this entire time and gone to gristle and lost the sharpness of his mind. He's already lived longer than the studies and the science say someone with his history ought to have lived. That he has not relapsed is testament to his strength but he thinks he gets his strength from God. It is God's work he does and it was his own Work that landed him in the hospital.

It was worth it. Lena and Sera walked away even if they walked away scarred.

What Work he does now is not that of judgment but of protection and recovery. Mingling in with the vibrancy of the Verbena's verdant magick is the powerful light of the Chorister's. That he has not pushed himself towards another Seeking has less to do with his power and more to do with his humility. All he wanted to do for so many years was better the lives of his flock. He saved so many and they pray for him daily and he knows that they do because Rosa calls once a week to check on him.

His hands shook for two months straight. He needed help to walk. He ate food from the earth and not from the abuelitas.

This month is better.

---

When she comes down the drive she finds the Verbena's truck is gone. She must have gone out. Maybe she wanted to leave the two of them alone. Grant them privacy out here in the middle of nowhere with the mountains in the distance and the trees grown all around. The air is sharp-cold and little sun makes its way through the clouds but sun does still shine.

And he feels her before she tromps around the side of the house to find him. He wears his cowboy boots and a pair of jeans and a thick sweater. A knit cap over his head so he won't freeze half to death out here in the fresh air and the portended snow. A blanket thrown over all of that and Sera hears him clear his throat before she hears the creaking of the slats of the chair, the stiffness in his bones.

They have both lost weight. He was probably close to 250 pounds when they loaded him into the ambulance and now he's on the other side of two hundred. Lower. He hasn't weighed this little since he was in prison. She can imagine what he would look like if he had started injecting heroin into his veins again. Not bone-thin yet she can read his cheekbones and his knuckles through the skin.

Pan hasn't shaved his face since he left the hospital. Kat is leaving that task for him to do himself.

"Serafíne," he says and walks towards her and his voice is warm despite the weather and the weathered look to him. "Ay, tan flaca estás, ¿qué pasó?"

Serafíne

Dan's hanging back, arms crossed. He's dressed in his usual hipster garb and has recently added a wallet chain to the standard ensemble of skinny black jeans and a button-down flannel. The sleeves are rolled up over his forearms, showing off acres of tattoos. It is cold enough out here that he can see his breath, but he does not seem to notice the cold except in his body posture. He is visible just at the edge of Pan's field of vision, stops walking in or as Sera's shadow as soon as Pan comes into view. And watches Sera, with a tight, thoughtful concern that flickers upward to slide over the priest, taking in the details of his appearance in the cold gray air.

Back to Sera then, who rounds the corner of the house, where it is embraced by an overgrowth of invasive English ivy that Kat has been battling since she purchased the property and sees him, the knit cap and the overgrowth of beard making him look more like a stick-up artist than a priest.

Oh, the first thing she does when she sees him is just: stop and look. Stop and stare, caught between the desire to run to him and the need to see him whole somehow. Or find the man she knew in the man he is, now.

It's not hard, even when he is so changed.

--

And here's Sera -

"Estás flaca también - " thrown right back to him, her voice fluctuant between the sort of sullen contrarianism that inspired her to ask a strange and powerful priest to, hey, make out with her in the confessional, and the sob gathered in the back of her raw throat.

Not much else gets out.

Her face is starting to crumble and she doesn't think that he's still injured, wounded, hurt. Healing. Does not know or understand the long, thankless hours he had to spend learning how to walk again, even if she knows all too well what it is like to be betrayed by both your body and you mind, all at once, all in.

So Sera just throws herself at him. Runs up to Pan and wraps her arms around his neck and hugs him and cries,

and cries

and cries.

Pan

This isn't what he was expecting when Kat hung up her rotary phone in the kitchen and told him a visitor would be coming by later on but for as little time as they did know each other Pan had accepted that he could not expect anything when it came to Sera. Their first meeting set up a standard of conduct but she was not just some wayward young woman with no respect for authority or sanctity or any of that bullshit. She had plenty of respect for plenty of things. Freedom was chief among those things.

He never brought any harm to his people even when she slept off a night of drugs and drinking on a pew in the back of the sanctuary or scared his replacement to the point where he considered calling the police to deal with her. If Sera thinks Pan did not hear about that incident then she underestimates how often Rosa speaks to him or the depth with which she does so.

And he is not still grievously injured but his body is healing as quickly as it can. Kat risks bringing down a terrible fate upon herself every time she reaches out to take away the wounds that linger and though she is hastening the healing they have had long talks about this. It is better that he convalesce out here with her than in the city with a mundane health aide who can barely change a bandage let alone keep a 45-year-old ex-convict from overexerting himself.

This is the best place for him. But he's too far from the city and the people in the city to be of any use to them. And Sera comes to him withered and wasted and when she throws herself at him he catches her. Tall as he is she cannot see him flinch with the impact. His arms are smaller than they were and his midsection is not flat as it was when he was her age but Sera can fit much more of him in her embrace than she used to be able to.

When she cries he has the strength left in him to hold her though. His breath leaves his lungs in a compassionate sigh and he wraps the blanket around both of them when he puts his arms around her.

"Vale," he says quiet and slow as he rubs her back, broad hand able to read every rib in her torso, "ya está, ya está."

As much an assertion that she's alright as it is that he is but Pan doesn't know what the hell happened to her so he just holds her until she's vented enough of the tears stored up that she can make room for words.

Serafíne

The priest holds her like that for a very long time.

Sera cries and cries, taking in great shuddering breaths between the storms of weeping and shivering in his arms. There's love and worry and fear and heartbreak and a strange, shuddering relief to find him here again, which feels quite nearly surreal after the long, terrible trial of her captivity. She is so. Very. Glad. to see him and feel him and so wretched with god knows what that her ravaged body can hardly contain it and beneath it all this stark and singular sadness she cannot quite capture or define, let alone excise, which has lodged itself beneath her sternum like a fist sometimes clenched around her heart: she cries for that, too.

Her temple pressed against his chest, her arms tight around his torso, the blanket wrapped around her, his resonance blast-bright all around them, Sera holds on so tightly and does not let him go unless she feels him start to physically falter. His shirt is damp with her tears; her nose is streaming. Her arms go all the way around him now and she can hardly process the fact that they meet in the middle of his broad back, where the column of his spine is flanked by broad, flat slabs of muscle beneath a layer of fat that is slowly disappearing.

Finally her body has had enough. The hitching shoulders, the shuddering breaths she takes in between what have become voiceless, noiseless sobs bring about a coughing fit. Sera tries to hold it down, but cannot fight it and lets him go at least, turning around and reaching for the wad of tissues stuffed into the pocket of her coat. Her back to him, her head tucked forward, the coughing fit seems nearly as violent and enduring as her tears. It hurts, it all hurts. She has coughed so much that her entire torso is sore and sometimes it is hard for her to believe that all of this is nearly over, because she still feels sometimes like the bride of death.

"I'm sorry," Sera says at last, her voice tight and high from the tension in her poor raw throat, her eyes still shining and damp with tears. Her voice hitching. "I probably opened up your stitches or something again. I just - I missed you. Miss you.

"It's good to see you, you know? I'm glad you're getting better. It's nice out here."

Pan

Not until Sera releases him to curl up on herself and cough a cough that sounds terminal instead of transitional does Pan let go of her. Even then he does not let go fully. His hands stay on her shoulders in case she crumples. And she can hear the blanket that he'd held around the both of them start to slide off of his shoulders. It does not hit the ground. By the time she has stopped coughing and the ache has wormed its way down into her bones he has righted the thing.

An apology comes as he is draping the blanket over her body. Not like a cloak or a cape. He wraps her up in it and she can hear the cautious rumble of laughter low in his chest as the priest secures her against the cold. With his hands at the edges of her vision she can see how the skin has grown thinner for the loss of fat beneath it. Veins shout blue against the brown of his skin. Hands tremble still but do not shake outright and she tells him she misses him. Lays praise upon praise onto his health and the land.

He sees her for the light is not so wan as her health and his sight is not impacted as is his balance and his memory. Pieces of thing have gone away from him and he has trouble retaining anything new. Sometimes the ground pitches out from underneath him or he feels dizzy out of nowhere. No medication to mar his judgment but he will be back to work soon.

Call it serendipity that she's come out here when she has. No call so strong to a shepherd as the call of those who need him. Sera knows Rosa talks him out of coming back each time she does talk to him. Even if she and Rosa do not speak to each other she knows Rosa speaks to Father Echeverría.

He's not yet well enough to stand behind a pulpit for an hour at a time wearing heavy robes and preaching in a voice bold as one come down from the mountains with a message. Sure as hell ain't well enough to throw himself into Chantry business or go off hunting Nephandi. This is the longest he's stood in a long time though. Take it as a sign.

"It is," he says. Hand laid against the space between her birdlike shoulder blades. "Come inside. I'll make you some tea. You can tell me what happened."

Serafíne

Sera follows Pan inside; or is guided by him. Shepherded by him, without really being conscious enough to note how he holds on to her lest she crumple, how he wraps her up in the blanket to keep the winter's-coming chill in the mountain air at bay. Ducks beneath his arm as he holds the door open for her, and does this sort-of shuffling walk inside. The illness is already passing. As close to death as she was, she will not understand the physical work that Pan's physical recovery has cost him, though other wounds will linger long after she is no longer drowning in her own blood.

The house is a good place: old, and rambling. It smells of woodsmoke and drying herbs and the last of the late fall flours. It smells of bread, which is rising, and stew, which is simmering on the cookstove, and the bright, clear scent of the white vinegar Kat uses to clean. While Pan puts the kettle on (the tick-tick-tick whoosh of the gas stove) and reaches for the teapot and handmade mugs with familiarity of long residence, Sera sits in one of the shaker chairs at the handsome wooden table, which is scarred from long use.

The blanket is still draped over her. She's fairly drowning in it.

It is easier for her to talk while he's engaged in the ordinary ritual of tea-making. Easier to begin. This is not a story she's told yet, and it is still livid inside her, in oh so very many ways. But she came here to see him, and she had to know he'd ask.

There were these people, Sera begins, while water rattles tinnily into the kettle from the faucet, Technocrats or something, former Technocrats, not Awake, though, right? Just rank and file, who defected, split themselves off. Made common cause with each other for reasons Sera does not know, entirely. There was a brother and sister whose nephew/son died in some fire started by a mage. A technocrat, Sera thinks, though she doesn't know.

As wretched as she is right now, as terrible as the damage, mental and physical, inflicted on her, Sera is a little sad for them. Their losses and their deaths and their deeds too.

"They wanted to rid the world of us," Sera is telling Pan as he comes to sit at the table, heavily in one of those chairs, to wait for the kettle to boil. Her eyes touch his, then fall back to her hands on the table. She can't quite bring herself to look at him for long. Not now, not yet. He knows what she means, though: us. " - so they made a virus that somehow only attacked us. Went looking for people on whom to try it.

"Found Grace and Sid. Lena and me."

--

Sera tells him, quite sparely, how she tried to heal herself. How it worked. How it stopped working. She does not tell him how bad things went, then: the wrenching hallucinations, the nausea, the constant vomiting, the way it felt to drown in her own blood.

"It got pretty bad," is what she says instead, with a spare and lilting looking. This grimace of a smile, as she does put some effort into staving off tears. "I was at home, Sid said we were infectious, so I locked everyone out. I guess I passed out.

"When I woke up, I was in this - this hospital room. This guy came in, told me he was trying to help me. I would've died if he hadn't brought me in to be cared for. Said he wanted to find a cure, I had to trust him, wouldn't I help them."

Sera shrugs. Watches Pan as he rises from the table to answer the shrill call of the tea kettle and makes the tea: not with bags but with a teaball and loose leaves from one of several canisters on the counter.

"I couldn't read his mind," Sera is saying, with a flick of her eyes to meet his. This spare and skeletal shadow of her usual smile. "but I knew he was a fucking liar. So I tried to escape. He used some drug to knock me out.

"They didn't strap me down, but they locked me in and only came in when I was unconscious. I kept getting sicker and sicker, too. Hallucinating my own death over and over."

And, lovely, ordinary, he pours tea. Steeped and fragrant into the handmade mugs. Sera's hands wrap around the stoneware seeking warmth reflexively. "They took Lena, too. Grace and Sid sort of escaped them. Sid found a cure or something, and one of those folks found a conscience, or something. Realized we were human, not monsters, reversed course.

"She got in touch with Sid and Grace and they came and broke us out.

"Now I'm cured." There are tears shining in Sera's eyes, but she is not actively crying, not now. Just - shining, and that last bit so remarkably wry, sweet, and bitter, and spare, and hollow. Her left shoulder hooks upward, and she finds Pan's gaze then, her own steady, steady.

"So they tell me. All better in a couple more days."

Pan

And he does listen. Even as his attention is tugged by the task he has set out for them Sera has the priest's eyes and the weight of them and the lightness of knowing she does not have to delve deeper than she wants to delve.

That he understands it got pretty bad means what she says. Means worse than what she says. Already broken down as she has she goes on and he lets her. His chest rises and falls in a show of his continued life. Ignore the overgrowth of beard concealing his sunken cheeks. The bruises where he's knocked his hands into the counter or the doorway as he's been walking. They shake under the table but not so bad as they did months ago. Things would leap out of his grasp then.

They didn't strap her down.

He brings one mug over to the table first. He moves so much slower than he's used to. Than she's used to seeing him move. In health he was a big man who was slow to speak and slow to rouse to anger or action. He thought before he did everything. Everything but comforting and consoling those who needed it. That was wired into his bones.

His mug rests on the countertop. Sera's eyes glisten with unshed tears and he considers her. The quiet brittleness of her bravery. And he could give her back words true and yet inadequate.

With a heavy breath in and out Pan reaches out a hand to touch her forehead. It does not still shriek with fever but he finds it warm still. She finds his hand thin now like the rest of him. Bony with its calluses gone. It's still his hand. If she does not flinch away from him he smooths hair back from her brow and guides it along towards the back of her head.

If he were Working now he'd try and smooth away the scar and the pain pulsing up from it but he is not Working. He's just comforting her.

His hand ends its journey at the back of her neck.

"Mija," he says, like a sigh. Like that can make up for all the things he can't say to make her be better now. "Cúanto lo siento."

Serafíne

Everything feels so dissolved and dissolving and Pan's presence is as surreal as the rest of it. The hallucinations have passed and the white room is a fading memory and she is in the warmth of a stranger's kitchen which exudes the terrible exactitude of cyclic life, and Serafíne is not quite sure whether she is dying or being born.

His hand on her brow, in her hair, the dark roots showing. Skimming down to the back of her neck. Her mouth compresses as she struggles to suppress a sob, or something, and her flat brows are all constricted over her dark eyes, this line bisecting her forehead, because he's still here, and so changed but immediate, that brilliant resonance a sunstorm around him.

Pan tells her, quite simply, that he's sorry.

That he is so sorry.

--

And Sera dissolves. Cannot remember where her skin begins; cannot remember that it was meant to contain her, constrain her within its boundaries. She leans against him, into him, holding on as if she were drowning, because she is drowning, just holding on.

--

The second time, it does not take her quite as long to cry herself out. Somewhere in the middle of all that he sways or she remembers or there is the sound of footsteps on the porch. Dan, maybe, taking up the outside perch that Pan abandoned in favor of tea in the kitchen with Sera. The tears slow, and stop, and Sera takes great shuddering breaths, and gives Pan this smile full of such adoration, such tight gratitude, such swimming feeling that another man, any other man, might find the gleam of her gaze utterly dizzying.

Then down and away, and "Your tea's getting cold," and he retrieves it and returns to the table, and they sit together as afternoon slips into evening.

There's no more discussion about Hydra or the white room, about antivirals or infectiousness, or blood, or strokes, or paradox. They are quiet, some, or they talk about smaller things, bits of gossip. Sera mentions that Justin went back to Wisconsin, that Jim and Sid are still around, and she is pretty sure they are involved. Involved. And so on.

They talk about the weather, and about winter, the bright wash of the sky, the snow on the mountains.

She does not ask him when she'll see him again, but from the way she takes her leave of him, later, after dark has fallen, it is clear that, seer that she is, Sera knows: she will see him soon.

Grace

Grace

Grace lies in a cot in the lab. It's white and sterile, but it's not like she minds. White is good. White is blank. At least there is no red. She hasn't the same fears as Sera, but it's likely that they'll all be sharing a few fears from now on.

She can't text, no phone. She can't code, no computer. So she stares with tired eyes up at a white ceiling, letting her mind take her where it will (except to certain places).

It's not sleep that she's trying for. Sleep is impossible. Just, a little blankness. The peace of nothing.

She still wears that grey jacket, with jeans that look like someone poured bleach into the wash instead of soap. She has changed clothes, put the others into the biohazard waste bin -- all except for that jacket, which she keeps wearing like it's going to protect her. She bought it because of zombies. Unfortunately, one cannot shoot a virus, or wear a jacket to protect against them. They just eat you anyway.

Serafíne

There's a knock at the door. It is far from insistent, but there's a certain expectation to it. There always is in places like these: it's not a request for permission so much as a warning. I'm coming in.

So the door to the lab swings open and an arc of light from the central hallway cuts into the room. It's a small office, and closed for the nonce. There aren't many options vis-a-vis visitors.

Sera tucks her head inside. She is dressed, now, in something other than the bloodied and filthy clothes they found her wearing: the white t-shirt, the gray sweats. Christ, what a choice. No: now, a band t-shirt and yoga pants of some sort and bare feet and her hair loose but still unwashed. Greasy.

The worst of the hallucinations have passed, but they still bubble at the extremes of her vision and sometimes bloom back into full and terrifying life.

Now though: a cough by way of interruption to match the knock, Sera framed by the light from the hall, pauses to see whether or not Grace is asleep, and crosses the room when she determines or decides that Grace is awake, just - staring.

Sera's path is slow and painful and she is wracked by a coughing fit mid-stream but terrible as she feels: she's getting better. She knows that, too.

"Hey," a skeletal hand on Grace's shoulder, when Sera gains the edge of the cot. She doesn't think, doesn't remember. Is reaching up to touch Grace's hair thoughtlessly. Gracefully. Gracelessly as she always does. "You gonna be okay?"

Grace

The knock on the door barely even gets through to her. There are noises sometimes. They don't bother her. But Sera, in her band shirt and yoga pants and that sensation of raw fascination, well... one can't help but look. The staring eyes then stare at Sera.

Skeletal Sera, whose yoga pants don't hide that fact. Whose body won't let her move, and she coughs and shuffles, and tries to comfort Grace.

And that confuses. Shouldn't she be comforting Sera instead?

Unlike most times, the touch doesn't seem to bother her. She's just been through too much to feel.

"I should be asking you that question. I didn't think you'd be ready for visitors yet."

Serafíne

"'m not, really," ready for visitors yet, Sera says, with a smile that feels terrible and starched and grated and sad and generous, all at once. Grace does not flinch from the touch, so there's nothing to remind Sera that it might not be welcome, so instead: her hand settles and her fingers curl through the fine strands of Grace's hair.

That's true. Her hair is filthy, dark with grease, tangled and perhaps even matted a bit. She is still sick, still feverish, still nauseated, has not made the first attempt at consuming solid food. Still in danger of dehydration. But:

"Don't really wanna stay here, either. I wanna go home. Hawksley and Dan are gonna take me. So," and her hand stills, palm cupping the crown of Grace's head. " - you still haven't answered me. You gonna be okay?"

Grace

At that, Grace sits up in her cot, whether Sera's hands are locked in her hair or not. "Sera, you can't. You're still infected."

The words should have some weight behind them, but Grace says them with all the emotive quality of a robot.

"Give the cure time to work. You could still be contagious."

And no, she is not going to answer the question.

Serafíne

Grace sits up, and Sera's hand slides from her hair then. It's for the best, joins her other hand wrapped around the metal frame beneath the thin mattress, where she's holding on to keep herself upright.

"I can't stay here," Sera's shaking her head, already shrugging off Grace's objections. There's as quiet thread of insistence beneath the words, though that gives them a weight Sera's raw throat and battered lungs cannot quite manage. "I just can't.

"I hate these places." Even a doctor's office with real beds to make the exam rooms seem as un-hospital-like is possible is still: a medical facility. With a bed. With cabinets and frames and posters on the walls. With an industrious, industrial certainty and a fucking lock on the door.

Probably, Sera doesn't know.

"I won't go out until I'm not infectious anymore, I just can't be here. But listen. If you need anything, I'll have Dan give you his number. 'Til I get a new phone, you can call him about anything, you know?

"He's cool."

Grace

In her mind's eye, Grace imagines Hawksley or Dan waking up from nightmares with a nosebleed, and shakes her head.

"I don't have a phone either," she says, and her eyes kind of glaze over with the memory of that. Strange how she was more concerned about her laptop than the people who fried. At the time, there was only the goal. And Callum was an obstacle, removed.

"If anyone you know starts showing symptoms... Just don't stop until they come here and get treated --" she says, her words cut off by a still horrible-sounding cough. There's not much blood left in her lungs, but she can feel it still. Getting better. Not there yet.

Serafíne

"I know Grace. Don't worry. They're not gonna get sick."

Sera says that looking right at Grace; all direct eye contact. Her own are bloodshot and bruised, the color lost in the low lighting of the room, familiar and wounded, these sinks of shadow. Pain etched into the fine lines that radiate from them.

"And if they do, they'll come here. I just - "

can't. Sera can't. She can't. She can't.

Sera is quiet as Grace coughs. Her mouth flattened as she struggles with the need to clear her own lungs. She wins for now, but only at the cost of some rattling breath.

"Dan'll bring you a phone. Then you can call him - " and Sera doesn't understand, really, what happened there in the end. The electronic pulse, or even how crippled Grace may be without her computer, but if Grace doesn't have a phone right now, she will, assuredly, in a few hours.

"Call if you need anything, okay? And Grace? Thank you for coming back for me."

Grace

"I couldn't leave you there. I thought, if they had some security in the way, I could bypass it. I really wasn't much help, though. I just couldn't leave you both there," she says, repeats, and again the voice is hollow.

"I know you'd come back for me."

She looks back at Sera, but those eyes -- there is nothing there. Like Grace has left for the time being, and may return, or may not. Like she's just going through the motions of being human, for Sera's sake.

Serafíne

Sera does not quite take note of that missing spark in Grace's eyes. Not tonight. Not this morning. There's too much there for her to see, and some essential part of Sera has closed itself off as well. It is the morning after, no longer than that, and Serafíne has hardly begun processing her own trauma. The fact of it, both physical and psychological.

Perhaps she never will.

Sera spends her life throwing herself into the next thing, and the next thing, and the thing after that, and never looks back. Not really, not entirely.

Sometimes, see: she just refuses to turn around.

--

So, this too feels like ritual. The bedside visit. The thanks and return: the reassurance of safety.

I'm fine. I'm fine.

Sera will have an easier time going home than any of them. Dan has cleaned the rugs and scrubbed her bathroom and hauled out the old, bloodstained mattress. He has: secured a new one and new sheets and duvet and washed them three times and made the bed. Laid in supplies of everything Sera wants when she is sick, which is: everything, and she's leaving the Verbena's office to go right home. To collapse into her bed, where she can cry in peace, where she knows that the only locks on the door are the locks that she controls. Where the windows open up onto a view of a garden-in-winter and a oak tree losing its leaves and the skyline of Denver tucked in beyond that.

"'Course I would," Sera returns, with a grimacing sort-of-smile that nevertheless seems genuine. It is. Sera wouldn't've left Grace behind. "Get better."

Then Sera turns to go. Her strength is low, and half-way across the room she sort-of staggers. Rights herself, recovers.

Someone's at the door waiting for her, pushes it open when that happens and Dan comes in to slip an arm around her spine, beneath her arms. He gives Grace a quick, apologetic smile over her shoulder and walks her out of the room.

Grace is left to sink back into that nothing she was seeking so diligently, alone. Maybe she drifts, later, into true sleep. Either way, later she finds that Sera was as good as her word.

Grace finds the newest version of her old phone left out for her on one of the counters in the lab. There's a handwritten note:

"Hope this works! Let me know if you prefer something else. - D."

Grace

Sera's gone, and so is Grace, back to staring at the ceiling. Still not daring to open up that miasma of fear inside. Eventually sleep wins, as it always does. But she wakes in the middle.

In her dreams, there is a delicate wasp in her hand, and suddenly the world shifts, the ground drops out from beneath her, and as she falls her skin sloughs off in sudden heat. And there is Sera, looking like a dying angel beside her, asking if she'll be okay.

It's upon waking from that, that she notices the phone. It stands out, black on the white in this room, blinking a purple dot of light at her. She walks up, reads the note, and clutches it to her chest for a while. It's just a phone, but more than that. It is connection. This is a symbol of that which she needs to find -- that wholeness of being at one with others, with the world.

She calls Dan when she can. Asks about Sera, in a voice that still sounds empty. Sera will get better. They'll all get better. At least their shells will. But when Lena finally speaks, and it's to accuse Luke of being a Hydra agent trying to kill her...

What of who they really are? Will they get better?

Aftermath

Serafíne

Sid leaves a message on Ginger. Hawksley is there - well, god only knows how fast he can drive that Porsche 911 when he intends to be somewhere ten minutes ago - not long after. A physician's office in the middle of the night, the loose sprawl of the city unknotted around him. Quiet in the way that cities can be, which is to say: full of the sort of ambient background noises one never notices until there is nothing else to hear. The good doctor likely does not offer Hawksley tea, but some intercourse passes between them. Enough at least that Luke is assured that Hawksley is no threat to his latest patients. Enough that Luke may attempt to reassure Hawksley in the slow, sympathetic drone of a family practice physician used to delivering news, good and bad, in that same deep and soothing voice, that they don't look well, but Sid's cure is working. Give them a few days. The symptoms can still be intense, but the cure is working. Patience.

Patience.

what a fucking thing to say.

The place is well-appointed in tasteful neutrals and we are assured that there is nothing hospital-like about the exam rooms except they are still that: exam rooms. With hospital beds and solid surface, easily-disinfected counters and white cabinets on the walls full of absurd things like tongue depressors and cotton swabs. With wallpaper maybe and without windows and with that closed-building-at-night hum to them the only counterpoint to the labored breathing of the patients.

He finds Sera in Exam Room 1. She is curled up with her back to the door, a white sheet pulled over her body, fists wrapped in the hem. There are blankets tangled at the foot of the bed where she has kicked them off and there is a strange, breezy whistle in the room, which will soon resolve itself to be the sound of her breathing. Wet and crackling and rheumy.

Sera looks: terrible. Verge-of-death terrible, though the finer points of how near-starvation and blood-soaked flu look on her familiar body are hidden beneath those sheets. Still he can see that she has lost weight; can see the articulations of her spine knuckling prominent beneath those sheets where the sweat from her fever makes the cotton cling to her body. Her hair has not been washed in god-knows-how-long, hangs in lank, oily, sweaty snakes on the cheap pillow, and the sour scent of sickness soaks the air around her.

Sera doesn't stir when the door opens, and he might think her sleeping until or unless he approaches her. When his shadow cuts across her legs or he says her name or what the fuck ever. Regardless, as soon as she stirs, as soon as he comes into view. As soon as she turns and catches him at the edges of her field of vision, half-rising over an unsteady hand flat on the plasticky mattress of the hospital bed, Sera

just

starts

crying.

Like she can't quite believe that he's real.

Hawksley

He really has no idea how to react once he comes inside. Truth be told, his instinct is to recoil. He wants to get out of there and take a very hot shower and somehow scrub the sight of it from his mind, the sound of that rattling breathing. His gut tells him this, but sometimes Hawksley trusts his intellect more, or his heart. It's not tough to say which one has him crossing the room after he enters it, shadow falling over Sera for only a moment before she begins to weep and he sinks down to sit on that bed, curving his hand over her skull, his warm hand that feels like sitting out in the sunshine not because of its warmth, not because he is like Sid, but because when he is nearby,

the spirit, if not the body, is in sunlight.

He cradles his hand there, frowning tightly, and does not beg her to stop crying, or start crying himself, or grab her in his arms and run out the door, or start demanding to know who did this are they dead can he kill them because... well. Whether or not any of those things even enter his mind, he is not unfamiliar with sitting bedside for someone who is... not well. And perhaps a bit delirious.

His hand feels the grease in her hair, his palm a soft pressure to her crown, but he strokes her hair a bit anyway, even if his palm never lifts to do so. It just moves her hair on her scalp, his fingers curling slightly, almost a scritch, but a terribly soft one. If he needs to, he urges her to just lie down, lie down, don't move, be still, but he doesn't say these things. Nothing aloud, not until:

"I told Dan. He'll probably be on his way soon, too," Hawksley says quietly, like all of this is totally normal and no big deal really and she just had like, the flu or something, which sucks, sure, but come on, let's be realistic, you're an adult and I know you feel like you'll never ever ever be better ever again but you're gonna be fine and all of this is implied and all of this is suggested by his tone because for Hawksley: all will be well. Everything always does work out for him, after all.

Including people he cares for not dying horrifically.

"I brought you presents from Paris and Barcelona," he goes on. "When you're not looking like a Holocaust survivor --" oh Hawksley you douchebag "-- you can come over and get them."

Serafíne

Maybe it's the warmth and immediacy of his presence. The soaring brightness of his resonance, the beat of wings around the edges of her battered psyche. The way, this close, she can feel him no matter how much she tries to close that part of herself off, because everything about her right now is raw, wounded, abraded, spent. Delirious, absolutely. Hallucinating sometimes, things crawling beneath her skin, tearing her apart.

He does need to urge her to lie down, lie down, a bit of pressure, a quiet, wordless cajoling, though there's not much urging necessary. Or rather: she is so utterly spent that she is compliant as a sleepy child with the familiar rituals of bedtime. So she drops the hand on which she was rising and settles back against the mattress with it curled beneath her. Knees drawn up, his hand cradling her filthy hair, her shoulders stiff with the promise of tears she cannot quite keep up because there is so very little left in her.

It works. That steadiness. That quiet normalcy, to pull her back from the edge of hysteria. Sera nods wordlessly as he assures her that Dan will be on his way soon, too. Then her mouth twists a bit and her face sort-of crumples like a cake left out in the rain without ever falling, entirely, over presents perhaps, or Holocaust survivor, or something that is written into the space between all those things, or the warm pressure of his hand in her hair.

There are no miracles here. Not tonight, not yet. Not the way that virus works.

"I wanna go home."

Her voice is dry and dull and tired and raw. She wants a shower. Wants to drown herself in hot water. She wants to sleep for a thousand years. Or at least seventeen.

Hawksley

There is something comforting about his inherent... aloofness to the earth. The way he is sunlight and flight, but not earth-bound things like touch or love or compassion. There is perhaps a little bit of comfort in looking up at a sky that asks nothing of you because it needs nothing of you. Because it barely even sees you in its own ecstasy of ascension, and does not worry about your pain, but its existence somehow lifts you up into its own beauty.

She is very weak, and he is always so very strong. She is so wasted and he is so much like the golden sky god she once saw him become in the periphery of her second sight. It takes so little for him to ease her back down, to make her curl up even if she cannot relax.

"Well, sucks to be you," he says softly, mildly. "Cuz I think you should stay here until you can say hello without crying like a big baby, and I'm bigger than you so I'll probably win."

Serafíne

Sera gives this narrow jerk of her skinny shoulders. It could be some spell of dry not-quite-laughter, or a spell of resistance to anyone telling her what's good for her right now, no matter how round-about.

"I'll scare you off," Sera threatens, but there's no push to her voice. Just a resistent, adolescent sulkiness slipping into sleepiness. Slipping into sleep. "And then Dan'll take me home."

Hawksley

"You'll try," he scoffs, in part because he has never seen her scare anyone off the way she can, the way she does. He leans over her, kissing her greasy, disgusting, unwashed hair that smells like hints of vomit and blood she's let loose, that smells like panicked sweat, like fever-sweat, like sick-leaving-the-body sweat. She is repulsive right now, she's so totally gross, and he moves back that gross hair and kisses her temple softly, warmly, breathing in all those nasty little scents and letting it exhale in a gentle curl across her brow.

Hawksley scrapes his teeth, ever so tenderly, across the upper curve of her ear, and then rests his head on hers, closing his eyes.

"Dan'll do what Dan'll do. Pretty sure I can take him or you in a fight, but maybe not both at once."

There's a beat.

"We're gonna come back to that 'both at once' thought in a few weeks when you're up and running again," like she's a broken computer or something waiting on an LCD replacement though honestly those don't take weeks to come in, seriously.

His hand has moved down to her back. "If you seriously wanna go," he says quietly, in a whisper, "we'll go tonight. We'll just get whatever you need from this Luke guy and let you get back in your own bed." His hand is rubbing her back, in heavy circles. "People recover faster at home," he whispers,

because he knows.

Serafíne

Some weak rejoinder is gathering itself beneath her skin; in her spine. You'll try he scoffs and she's breathing in - one of those wet, wheezing breaths - to throw something wholly inane and straight from the third-grade playground back at him when he's closer, leaning over her, kissing her temple. That half-drawn breath stills and he can see in his peripheral vision the flicker of her lashes as her eyes open and she is trying to turn to take him in but there's no strength in her and he's so still,

so soft, and warm, and tender, no matter how gross she is right now.

She hates these places.

Hates these places.

Does not tell him that but maybe he can feel it in the shaking tension in the small of her back that is all things at once: fear and gratitude and relief, such fucking relief she can hardly stand it when his tone changes, slips into something else entirely, and he assures her so quietly that they'll get her home, out of her, back in her own bed. Can hardly contain the sensation of it within her own broken body, does not know, exactly, how she can bear it.

Sera starts to cry again.

These tears are different, though, shed soundlessly over the tight twist of her mouth and that is a grimace but nearly-a-smile, as she nods yes or thank you or whatever it is she needs to say to him.

All of it, everything.

Because he knows: people recover faster at home.

Serafíne

Charlotte: Per + Empathy: blood-on-hands?

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Hawksley

For a long time, they would not let him see her. The doctors, nurses, caregivers. His father. He agitated her. Even mention of him would drive her to dizzying heights only to drop her, crashing, to the earth, and there were sedations and there were,

sometimes,

restraints.

But they could not, would not let him see her. And he wanted to tear the place brick from brick, tear the people limb from limb, but he did not. He waited. And in this way, this patient way that does not seem like something Hawksley could ever be capable of, he got what he desired.

"Well not if you're going to freak out," he says gently, softly, not quite laughingly because he's still somewhat afraid, deep down and cold in his belly, that she's about on the verge of death. He lies down beside her, facing her, sharing that crinkly pillow, because he was assured that nothing is contagious now, he's okay, and he is unafraid of her. He covers her with his arm, and he's close, closing his eyes, waiting for Dan to come to get Sera out of here. He'll send Collins for the car tomorrow or something. For now, this jobless young man who can do what he wants when he wants with whomever he wants and does not take kindly to being denied anything,

will just stay with her.

Escape

Hydra

Given the urgency of their mission, the trip out to the lab probably felt longer for Sid and Grace than it actually was. When they were about a minute away, Katie suggested they pull over and rearrange themselves in the car with the two mages ducked down in the back seat - the better to avoid notice from the security cameras in the lab's parking lot. With only three guards left at the facility, they were bound to be on alert for anything unusual. When they finally arrived, they parked at the far end of the lot. Peering carefully out the windows, Sid and Grace would see what looked like a fairly nondescript red brick building. They were on a relatively empty stretch of road, and every now and then a plane would soar past overhead on its way to or from the nearby airport. The sign out front read "Lerna Laboratories."

Before exiting the vehicle, Katie turned to Grace and Sid to explain what she was about to do. "I'm going to go take care of the guards. When I get back, I'll take you to the basement cells where your friends are being kept. We need to get them out of there as quickly as possible, so while you're doing that, I'm going to head up to the labs to activate the disinfection protocol. Once I've done that, we'll have ten minutes to get out of the building before it locks down and burns everything inside, so it's very important that we exit as quickly as possible. Understand? It's very important that we destroy the lab, and any trace of the virus left inside."

------------

Meanwhile, in the basement, Lena and Sera were unaware of what was going on above. It had not been a good week for the two of them, but they were hanging on. Weak and sick, their days were full of waking nightmares that felt all too real. Lena, in her concern for her Tradition-mate, had been sending out empathic projections of calm warmth and calm. It allowed Sera a few precious moments of rest that she might not have otherwise had.

At that moment, they were both blessedly free of the trap of those waking dreams, though for how long?

Hydra

[Edit: "Understand? We have to destroy the lab, and any trace of the virus left inside."

Also: "projections of warmth and calm." (Yeesh.)]

Lena Reilly

Since that moment when Katie appeared in her room a few days earlier, Lena has been like a caged animal. The smart thing would have been to play it cool and act like everything was still the same, but the Ecstatic is past the point of such dissembling. Like most of her Tradition, she is a creature who is both master and slave to the Nine Sacred Passions and with lucidity being constantly torn away from her with every waking nightmare, every bloody cough, she has lost the ability to act in her own best interests. Lost the ability to play nice and let then just take her blood and serve her empty platitudes.

Lost her ability to give. A. SHIT.

She may not be terrorized by whatever hideous hallucinations this disease can combine with her mind at this moment, but let's be frank, ladies and gentlemen...there is nothing worse it can conjure than the fact that she's going to die here alone in this hell-hole, wasting away to fucking disease while her friend does the same elsewhere in this very facility. They're Ecstatics who are about as far from Ecstasy as you can get and she has not made the life of Callum's little flunkies easy. She's ranted and raved, yelling to the camera things like "You didn't think I would find out, you piece of shit?" and "Come in here and I'll show you what disease is all about."

That is, when she's not curled up in the corner, sobbing and scared.

At the moment she's lucid. And at the moment, she's pacing, scratching at the sores that she's picked into her body. (They only make her mental state worse; they're so similar in her blurry vision to the lesions that are a part of Karposi's sarcoma). As much as her weakened body will allow; she's moving on pure Rage, pure Wrath. It will get her through and so help her, if her friends die she will figure out a way from the other side to make those involved pay.

Sid

It is with reluctance and great trepidation that Sid listens to Katie. She does so because she knows, she knew before she let her effect finally drift apart, fragile as a spider's web, that the woman told them the truth. Her intentions are sincere, she has only been honest with her. Sid still distrusts. Katie may very well be telling the truth - as she sees it. She may be helping her - because someone else is using her guilt to their purposes. Because soon, very soon, all four infected Mages will be inside the facility.

Still, what choice does she have? Her friends are inside and she and Grace will find them, they will save them, they will get them out.

While she's ducked down, tall body twisted uncomfortably so that she isn't seen, she sends a quick text. There's no time to access Ginger and make a broadcast as wide as possible, so instead Sid sends a message. It's a follow-up, actually, their more exact location sent to a Disciple Cultist just in case...well, just in case.

Sid is not the best at being sneaky, she's a scientist (or was, once upon a time) not a ninja. Still, she can scan her surroundings and let them know if someone is near or coming near. Hopefully.

Katie tells them they'll have ten minutes, and Sid frowns as she draws a small diagram on the inside of her wrist.

[Go go Gadget Life scan!]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 8) ( success x 1 )

Grace

After the adrenaline shock wore off, and Grace had finished venting her anger at Katie, there wasn't much to do but plan and wait on the car ride. She calmed down somewhat, but was still quite unnerved by the woman, and spent the time staring at her waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"Oh I understand. If that shit leaks out of your lab..." she says. 'Your lab', like she's still thinking of Katie as being on the other side.

She listens to the plan, and it's not half bad. Maybe somebody in their group wasn't a complete idiot, because they did have a disinfection protocol. They thought ahead.

So she ducks down with Sid in the back, "You letting people know where we are?"

Serafíne

The room is white and the walls are white and the walls and concrete and there is a door; you remember the door when it opens. It has a window that frames a view of the corridor.

The corridor is always the same.

The place has a rhythm that is internal and both unvaried but unpredictable. There are pipes in the walls, wrapped in concrete block, framed by drywall and structural steel. There is a hum. The hum is not a human hum and may not be a hum at all. It may well be the intense and immediate physical experience of soundlessness. Except for the low, insistent beeping of the heart rate monitor when it is connected or its higher pitched objection after it has been disconnected there is a sort of ambient nothingness that feels round, pregnant and full.

Sometimes Sera remembers that she should try to leave the IV in her arm. It is the only thing keeping her alive and she is now barely alive. She has not eaten in two weeks. Threw whatever they shoved through the prison-like hole in the door right back at those bastards when she was still capable of downing food, and has not been capable of eating for some time.

The lucid moments are the strangest. Worse, somehow, than the waking nightmares where she is torn apart from within; where she tears herself apart; where she is ripped apart, scissored open, consumed and consuming. Terrorized and terrified.

Lucid she is in a white room; alone, dying, so weak she can hardly stand. Except, as long as she can hardly stand, as long as she has the strength to so much as crawl, Sera refuses to lay around in that bed. Sometimes she drags herself to the door, leans then, slapping her hand open and rhythmic against the metal. Sometimes she curls up in the bathroom, between the sink and the toilet, taking some sort of comfort in the porcelain.

Its proximity.

Its familiarity.

That's where she is now; curled up in a semi-fetal position, shivering, involuntarily, from the climate-controlled cold in the room, wasted and spent.

Hydra

Katie had been quiet in the car, allowing Grace her outlet to vent. There was no attempt made on her part to defend herself or her colleagues. Everything about her appearance and manner suggested a woman weighted down with silent guilt. What could she say, really? Nothing. So she didn't try. Inside the lab, there were two dying women who'd spent the last week and a half in a world of sickening, claustrophobic torture. They were there because of Hydra. One of them from Katie's hand directly.

If Callum and the other members of Hydra (was the virus named after the group or the group named after the virus? did it matter really?) had found Lena's sudden change of heart suspicious, thankfully they hadn't seemed to pinpoint the source of it, because Katie's security access worked just as well as it always had. She jogged across the parking lot, coughing into a tissue as she reached the door and let herself inside.

Then all was still, apart from the ubiquitous sonic echo of the planes.

Five minutes went by. Maybe Sid and Grace would begin to expect some sort of trick. Or perhaps Katie had been found out and captured by her own people.

Another minute. Two.

Finally she reappeared, running quickly towards the Audi. She gave a wave to indicate that they exit and follow her inside. "I drugged the guards and turned off the cameras."

Assuming they were ready to follow, Katie led the way back inside the building, taking a path through a brightly lit welcoming area with an empty front desk and moving at a brisk pace down a long white hallway. They passed a couple of closed doors on their way to the stairs, but Katie didn't stop to offer a tour.

At the end of the hall, another locked door led down into the basement. Katie entered a code into the security system and the door unlocked, allowing them access. Then it was down a flight of concrete steps into another long white hallway.

And there they were. So close now that Sid, with her active life scan, would be able to feel the weak, unsteady pulses of her two friends in the locked cells. Lena was closer, followed by Sera at the end of the hall.

Katie unlocked both doors, working quickly as she ran from one to the other, hiding her next coughing fit against the sleeve of a raised arm.

"Remember, you've got ten minutes once I activate the disinfection process, so get them to the car as soon as you've given them the injections. I'll rejoin you as soon as I can."

This was what Sera and Lena heard as the locks on their cells clicked open.

Lena Reilly

Her attention snaps to the door when she hears that telltale click, eyes narrowed. She's past the point of trusting anything she sees or hears now; the waking nightmares have made that basically impossible. Even hearing Katie's words don't make her believe what she's hearing; her mind could easily be making this up in some fevered pitch of hope, or she could be the target of some new trick by Callum.

Frankly though, she doesn't much care. As long as she's got a way out of this room, it could lead into a wall of gunmen ready to blast her into oblivion. Callum well knows she's accept that over dying of this thing.

And so she takes slow, belabored steps, weezing as she does, toward the door. Just in case someone might be coming who wants to keep her forced in here (she wouldn't put that kind of mind game past them), she spits a bloody mouthful that she just recently coughed up into the palm of her hand. It may not be the most effective deterrent--she doesn't know if she'll be able to actually get it into someone's mouth or the life, and even if so they may be immunized against the Hydra virus--but people generally want to play it safe with HIV. She leans weakly against the wall and, with her free hand, she reaches out to open the door. Sure, her hand slips on the handle and she has to fumble a little, but she pushes it open and stumbles her way to

Freedom. Even if it's not freedom from this place, it's a minor victory. It's about all she's got.

Sid

When Grace asks her question Sid merely nods her head once, the movement very slight in the dark cramped back seat. And then they are waiting. A minute passes, two, but they might as well be hundreds, even thousands of years. Sera and Lena are in there, they're dying and if something goes wrong they won't even know that their friends are right there, were there, are trying to get them out.

Sid is silent through the wait as she runs over again and again the contents of her bag. What she has, what they look like, what she needs, what she hopes she doesn't need. A sort of desperation rises all around her, radiating from her every pore as she reaches out and finds each living creature within a radius of them. When Katie returns Sid does not relax. Her shoulders remain tight, every muscle taut with tension as she makes her way out of the car.

She follows the woman through the maze of the building's interior, hoping Grace is taking notes on their passage because Sid is taking out a needle and poking it into a small vial. Then she caps the needle in plastic and unwraps another, repeats the process. They have to be ready to go, from reunion to injection to run-run-run in a matter of moments.

Down the stairs and to the keycode and Sid passes a needle to Grace outside Lena's door. "Let her do it," she says, meaning Lena, who if she hasn't had to inject someone before has likely watched it done a hundred thousand times to herself. They're all sick, though, with Grace a little better. And Sid, the healthiest of them all, she beelines for the door to Sera's room, to Sera, shoving past Katie as soon as the door is open.

"Sera!" she calls, perhaps needlessly as she looks around, her heart hammering in her chest. She knows because she can feel it what she can expect, but knowing only prepares her for the visual. Sera, sick and curled up in the bathroom. Sid goes to her quickly and drops to her side.

"Sera," she says, and her voice is strangled, her throat constricting at the sight of Sera, so vibrant even when she was fasting, wasting away, all for what? Sid never asked. This time it's different, she knows. Sera is dying, but not for much longer, not anymore. "It's me," she says as she fights back tears of relief and tears of pain, pulling Sera toward her as she thumbs off the protective cap of a needle. "I'm sorry," she whispers, because she knows enough to know this, this place, it's bad to Sera and Sid's about to make it worse with one more needle's prick.

[extending that scan]

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (4, 10) ( success x 1 )

Grace

Her friends had been imprisoned here, dying. Hallucinating their deaths over and over again. Grace was a little afraid of what she might find inside. Would they be lucid, or crazed? Would she be able to help them get out?

The doors click, and Grace takes one of them. Lena's door. "Lena? It's Grace," she says, right before the handle jags and she lets go. Her voice is scratchy from the cough still, and she does have to lean her face into her elbow and give it a good fresh blood stain. But she doesn't look that bad.

Lena does. For all that Grace has been through herself, she stares for a second at the state of the woman in front of her. And then, just holds up that syringe that Sid gave her. "Sid found a cure Lena. We're going to be okay," she says in that weak little sick voice. But there's more than sickness in that wavering. It's like she's telling herself it's going to be okay too.

Serafíne

The door, opening. Or rather, first - the locks. The low tumble of cylinders, the scrape of metal-on-metal and the quiet immediacy of Katie's voice. The last handful of words, tossed over her shoulder to Sid and Grace. Caution or admonishment and Sera breathes out, lifting her chin and swinging her head to watch the shadowed edge of the door against the white-washed concrete walls. The vertigo is briefly overwhelming.

She fights the urge to retch.

There's nothing in her stomach, so the energy expenditure would be futile, anyway.

--

The wasted, skeletal creature that was Serafíne is struggling to stand as Sid pushes open that door. Has both hands on the cold toilet set and her head bent over, her long hair lank, greasy and damp. Dark roots clearly showing where the blonde dye ends, tangled ends falling forward over her shoulders into the bowl as, shaking, she pushes herself to try to stand.

Sid gets there first; sinks to her knees on the cold tiled floor of the small, industrial bathroom before Sera has done more than brace her hands over the toilet seat. It is ridiculously easy for Sid to pull Sera close, to tug her away from the toilet, as there's next to no strength left in her body and her whip-lean frame has lost all fat and more than a bit of muscle in the days since she was brought here.

"Sid." A drifting look, over her shoulder toward the open door. "I'm not hallucinating."

Her voice is raw. The words don't carry beyond the bathroom. Sera's hands are covered with bruises and a smear of trail of dried blood trickles from her left nostril over the mobile mouth that so usually twists itself into some sort of edgy, knowing grin. That spirit seems to be almost wholly eclipsed, but there's a spark of something brighter, seizing, angled but unbending at the shadow of the open door.

Sera endures the needle prick, then rises - rather heavily - with Sid's assistance, tearing out the IV for what one hopes is the last time.

They are half-way across the 'hospital' room when a sudden, geysering burst of raw something seizes Sera, and she reaches, grasps that rolling IV pole and throws it across the room.

Tries to throw it across the fucking room.

And then leaves it, god she's weak, the world spinning unpredictably all around her, working to remember how to breathe as Sid supports her on the way out of the room.

Hydra

This was the place that Sid and Lena had been living in since their disappearance: white concrete rooms (no, cells) with a hospital bed, a chair, a table and some medical equipment. The doors used to lock them in were heavy metal things that creaked from their own weight when opened. Inside, the rooms had once been clean and sterile, but now they reeked of disease and the coppery tang of blood and bile. It'd been about 24 hours since the rooms had been cleaned, so likely there were dark red stains on the painted floor or the sheets on the beds.

Lena and Sera were dressed in matching white t-shirts and grey sweatpants, which they barely filled out anymore despite the small sizes. They looked awful. Worse even than Grace had looked toward the end. Katie had been telling the truth when she'd said that both of them were close to death. Sid would be able to sense it instantly, the way the disease had eaten at them from the inside. The infection itself had reached a kind of climax point - like it was hovering on the brink of a final attack. (And jesus, what did this thing look like at the end? Did it waste its victims away to nothing, or was there some horrible finale in store?)

Katie didn't stick around to see the reunion. She was already halfway up the stairs by the time Lena opened the door to her cell. Soon, she'd disappeared, leaving the other four to their own devices. Grace with Lena and Sid helping Sera up from her collapsed position on the bathroom floor.

And then those life-saving syringes were brought out...

Had Sid really found a cure? It almost didn't seem possible. But look - Sid herself seemed almost healthy, and Grace, though sick, was a far cry better than either of the Cultists. So perhaps it really was true.

Lena Reilly

She narrows her eyes when she sees Grace, and she isn't sure within that spotty vision whether the woman she's seeing is really Grace, or just an overlay. The Ecstatic is covered in those pick-marks over her skin; her eyes are red-rimmed and unfocused and she's lost more weight than a person really should. Even in whatever amount of time it's been since she was last tended to, her clothes have been spattered with her own blood as she's coughed it out (itself even more dangerous than Hydra-tainted blood). And there's a tense moment where Lena looks at Grace with all the rationality of a rabid animal, when it almost seems like she's about to decide fuck it and deliver the biohazardous payload in her hand anyway.

But...she doesn't. This may not be Grace (c'mon Lena, be honest...probably isn't), but there is a sliver of chance that she might be. And if not...maybe this will be the needle that finally kills her. Dead or saved, she doesn't really care at this point.

So she reaches behind her into the room to flick the slimy, red-streaked phlegm in her hand into the room she just staggered out of, then shakes her head when Grace says We're going to be okay.

"Bullshit." She forces the word out through a raw throat, and takes the needle. She looks at it a second, then rips the protective cap off of the end and feels around on her arm for a vein. It probably takes longer than it should, but soon she pushes the sharp end in without reaction to however much it may or may not hurt, pushes the plunger down. "Don't touch me. Not safe."

"Where's Callum?" she asks as she drops the needle to the ground. More hateful words have never been heard coming out of the woman's mouth.

Sid

Someone will find out what those final stages feel like. There is at least one person infected who will not feel the pressure of a needle as Sid's cure is forced into his veins. Sid had seen to that, because she knew things about this virus even its makers couldn't. There is a good chance that it will still get out, who knows if someone Sleeping had somehow been infected while these four were still able to be out and about? Who knows how it will spread out from Eric, who Sid hopes with all of her might is lying twisting writhing as his own immune system fails him and his own creation kills him from the inside out. And Sid is fairly certain that someone is the one she senses upstairs.

Sid shouldn't take satisfaction in that, or at least most wouldn't expect it from her. She's so quiet, seems so timid and so shy, that must mean she's a kind, soft-hearted soul, yes? But these people, these strangers, they tried to kill her and her friends simply because of what they were and how they viewed the universe. But when Sid looks upward at the ceiling as though she can see through the floor to the rooms above a smile twists the corners of her lips, small and satisfied.

She doesn't dwell on it, though. No, Sid will not be completely satisified until they're sitting in Sera's kitchen again, eating cake and getting drunk or high or both, talking like there's nothing wrong. That day will probably never come, really, things will never be the same after this. They will never be okay again, not really.

Sid doesn't let herself think about that as she pushes the needle into Sera's arm, her veins all to easy to find now that there's so little between them and the surface of her skin. Sid tries to sound light when she says to Sera, "I'm not a hallucination," rather than No you're not hallucinating. She could still be for all the Sid knows. When the needle's saving payload is delivered, Sid casts it aside and pulls one of Sera's arm around her shoulders, bracing her. Together they head toward the door, but Sid pauses, waiting with Sera as that something courses through her, lets her get that out of her system. Soon (hopefully, if Katie can really be trusted) this whole place will go up in flames.

"I'm sorry it took so long," she says, her heart breaking on the words even though she knows they got here only as fast as they could. Still, there is guilt, because while they were here suffering who knows what Sid was in Luke's practice, protected. "Katie brought us. She said she's going to shut this place down. We have to hurry."

Grace

Grace's clothes are spotted with large bleach stains, and the jacket she has on has a few spots of blood where she's coughed into it. She's been there. But not any more.

Lena's clearly not herself, and while Grace certainly has a lot of anger towards the man, there are more important things to do, other than trying to find Callum right now. Such as get the fuck out.

"Callum's off laying a trap for Sid. It's the only way we could get in here -- he emptied the lab trying to get to her. But Lena, we have like 10 minutes to get out of here. The hydra's going to die in fire all right? They've got a failsafe that's going to blow this place away."

Serafíne

The room is going to peel itself apart from the inside out. Something will go wrong. Sometimes what you notice is the way the lines of the walls begin to weave themselves narrowly and of their own accord. Sometimes it is simply the way the light shines back at you, as if it was waiting for you to notice. The places where things go and where they go wrong are myriad and unsettling and each of these things has gone so very wrong for Sera lately. This room is distinct from every other hospital room and -

- god, in truth Sera hardly feels the prick of the needle through her skin. It is the least of the wounds she has endured. Sid assures Sera that she herself is not a hallucination and the only reason Sera believes her is that thus far Sid has burrowed her way through Sera's eyes to begin consuming her brain, or something just as shiveringly macabre.

So, Sera does not say anything else to Sid. Just nods, the gesture rough and dry, leaning on Sid as they shuffle out of the room. If Sera knew that there was someone else upstairs,

dying of this shit,

(yes, even Erich),

she might -

- oh, but she does not know. All she knows is how to stumble forward, half-supported by her friend.

Hydra

Flames. Sera had dreamed of flames - of fire. Blazing and hot and humming with the deep, resonant sound of an inferno. What she hadn't known at the time is what it meant - only that it held some connection to Katie's future. Now she could put the pieces together. This was it. This was the end.

They were getting out. They were going to destroy this place. Burn it to the fucking ground.

Lena wanted to know where Callum was, but retribution would have to wait. He was gone, along with most of the others. Wherever Katie was - whatever she was doing - they had no time to wait. She'd said she would meet them, and they'd have to trust her to do so. It was time to leave.

Lena Reilly

She stares dully as Grace tells her that Callum's not here. And she really doesn't pay attention to the rest of it--anything that Grace says after laying a trap for Sid. She starts moving in that moment past Grace, toward the exit. If he's not here, she doesn't want to be here. And so she starts to walk, with as much speed as she can muster (but really, it's more determination than speed), with one hand against the wall to support her.

And in truth, she still doesn't really believe this. Maybe it's the Technocracy; maybe they're Sid and Grace clones. Maybe it's hallucinations. Maybe she just injected herself with ebola to create the ultimate supervirus. Either way, she's still moving forward. There's just a point where your mind takes you to a space beyond fear. Even for someone who lives in it the way Lena does.

Sid

They make their way out into the hallway, their progress as quick as Sera can manage but still painstakingly slow. There are still hallways to get through and a car to reach and a Katie to (trust to) meet. She said the car would be a tight squeeze on the way back, and it had taken some effort on Sid's part not to suggest leaving her behind. But Sera. Sera wanted her to have a second chance and so Sid is going to let her. At least, she isn't going to hinder her, and to her, right now? It's pretty much the same thing as helping her.

Out in the hall she sees Lena and that gives her strength. Lena's alive, Lena's making her way out whether she knows it or believes it herself. This is going to work.

All the while, Sid keeps that net cast. She feels for the other patterns, already cataloging the ones she's found. Three guards sleeping, one person very ill. And those she knows. So far, so good.

They make their way toward freedom from this toxic nightmare.

Grace

Well, so much for a happy, or even tearful reunion. Lena's ignoring her, shuffling her way along the wall. But then, it's Lena who's suffering. Who is Grace to argue with the way she's dealing with it? Instead, she tries to play along. As she walks alongside Lena, not touching as requested, she vents.

"Callum is such a god damned fuckup. Using a virus like this? He could have killed everyone in the world, we're talking human extinction here. Sid found out Hydra's figured out a way to jump hosts."

Serafíne

She wants out. Out out out. That desire to get out out out is growing stronger, gathering momentum the further they go. There's the illusion of strength and Sid can feel Sera straightening, moving faster - which is not to say fast - but can feel the urgency of it beneath her skin. And everything else she's holding inside her, which radiates from her in subtle tremors as they move.

Down the white hallway and toward or perhaps even up the stairs. The threads of her vision are knitting themselves together in the back of her mind as Grace and Lena fall into a sort of step beside them, Lena holding herself up, Grace venting about Callum and the rest in ways that Sera herself can hardly comprehend right now.

"Are there other people here?" Sera asks, as they pass other doors; other windows, other rooms. The space has a haunting sameness to her and she cannot suppress the shudder that wracks her body as she says that, " - in the rooms. They should have a chance."

To escape, Sera means.

To escape, too.

Hydra

They made their way up the stairs, limping and stumbling. Sera asked after other prisoners, but there were no others. The other cells were vacant. Whatever the people here had been trying to accomplish, they'd started small. Perhaps Katie had been right about this being an experiment of sorts.

Meanwhile, the lifesaving virophage began to do its work in the Cultists' bodies, swimming through their bloodstream to attach and embed itself within the Hydra virus. It would take time for Lena and Sera to feel the effects of the cure, but Sid and Grace had reached them in time.

They would live.

At the top of the stairs, there was a (still-open) door leading to a long white hallway. On the ground floor, the construction was cleaner - proper walls and wooden doors and a tiled floor. The place looked just like the inside of any number of smaller science facilities. Maybe it had been the property of the government or some research company at some point.

As the four of them began to make their way down the hallway, Sid would sense the nearness of Katie's now-familiar pattern, along with the threading, erratic pulse of another (the one she'd assumed - probably correctly - was Eric) approaching them from inside one of the rooms to the right. A moment later the door pushed open, and Katie stumbled out into the hallway ahead of them with a man draped over her shoulder.

It was Eric. But the way he looked now was a far-cry from the way Sid and Sera remembered him. Not the beautiful wannabe actor with his just-perfect tan and gym-sculpted physique. Gone was the easy confidence and the glow of health. In the span of only one week (less time than it had taken for the others - perhaps the virus affected Sleepers differently, or perhaps, as Sid and Grace suspected, it was simply growing stronger) he'd become a pale ghost of himself, weakened and sickly and bleeding from nose and mouth and...

There was blood oozing from his ears, too. And when he breathed, they could all hear the choking gurgle of fluid in his throat.

Katie stumbled - almost dropped him. And when she righted them both she looked up with a panicked expression, knowing full well how the others were likely to react to the sight of the man leaning up against her in a barely-conscious daze.

"Please," she said. "He's the only family I have left."

When she spoke, Eric lifted his head and blinked, as though noticing the others for the first time. "What the fuck are they...!?"

Whatever he was going to say, it was drowned in a fit of coughing, and a fresh splatter of blood struck the wall.

"I'm trying to save your life!" Katie snapped. "Leave them alone. It's over. This is all over."

But whatever impending argument was about to ensue... whatever reaction the others may have had to Eric's appearance, in the end it didn't matter. It was too late. The man gave another cough, so hard this time that it wracked his entire body. He choked and coughed, and then he started to scream. Katie couldn't hold him any longer, and he collapsed onto the floor, curling into a ball as some kind of spasm worked its way through his muscles.

When he screamed, it sounded like he was drowning. And when he looked up and opened his eyes, bloody tears streaked their way down his cheeks.

"No no no no..." Katie started to cry as she crouched down beside him, pleading in desperation for some miracle that was never going to come. "Please, just a little longer. Eric!"

He gave one final scream, agonized and dying, and then an invisible vice clamped down on his throat and he could no longer take in breath. What happened next would seem like another hallucination to Sera and Lena. It so closely mimicked the nightmares they'd all been having. Patches of red opened up on Eric's face and arms as the skin pulled open and began to melt away.

It kept going, dissolving away the epidermis and the muscle... literally eating him alive. His eyes were huge and terrified as the spasms went through his body...

Until he literally melted away, leaving behind a bloody, skeletal corpse.

Katie didn't move. She sat there, crouched in a pool of her brother's blood with tears rolling down her cheeks, and uttered a frail, broken sound.

Lena Reilly

She keeps walking. Step by step. One foot in front of the other, away from hell and toward freedom. Of course, it was a temporary freedom at best for her because even if she did somehow make it out of here, one day she'll be back in a room just like it, looking much the same way and breathing her last. But even a brief respite from that...it's something.

It's hard, getting up the stairs. But she forces herself up. She's not going to die here and even if she was being cured by this concoction that Sid--brilliant, amazing Sid--had come up with, she didn't really want to get blown up either.

And then, just like that, there's Katie and the man she'd never met before. There's a moment's confusion in Lena's still-bleary mind before the whole scene starts to unfold. She weaves there a moment, leaning against the wall. She watches the whole thing unfold.

And when we say the whole thing, we mean the whole thing. She stares dully as the disease eats Eric and rips him apart, dissolving him into nothing but a mess of blood and a skeleton. Maybe deep down, she feels sorrow for the loss. Maybe there's some empathy left in her for Katie, knowing what that must be like for her.

Right now, she's just too burned out to feel anything but Rage and Hate. But it's telling (and perhaps encouraging) when she starts walking up to Katie, ducks down and struggles to slip her head under the broken girl's arm, to lift her up.

Forgiveness? Hard to say. But maybe, despite the fact that she does it all with the expression of a very angry zombie, the Ecstatic isn't completely gone off the deep end.

Grace

Grace hasn't watched a person die before. Not like this. There had been deaths at the theater, but she hadn't seen them really. And this, so much like one of her feverish hallucinations, really happening to someone else?

She can only make it a few steps before she starts to retch. It's not blood that comes up this time. This isn't the virus' doing. It's the terror of it all. That's what would have happened to her if not for Sid.

She would have been eaten like that.

Who does this, who makes a thing like Hydra? And then, who releases it, knowing that this is the result?

In between her spasms of nausea, she gets out the occasional "Oh God," as if she believed in a God, really. Who could, when this is a thing that exists.

Sid

When the door opened and Katie spilled out, Sid was already shifting closer toward the wall, and she was putting herself between the woman and her friend. She would protect Sera until her dying breath if Katie turned on them, if the sick one lunged at them.

And there they are, the pretty siblings, only one of them is looking considerably worse for wear. Sid knows she should feel bad, she should feel guilt for what she's done. She did that to him. She knew that the barrier that kept the Sleepers safe was breaking down. The cold twist in her stomach comes from something else. It comes from Katie trying to beg for her brother's life. She must realize how that request will go with them. Katie was spared because of Sera, and because she offered the aid they needed to get their friends out. Eric? Eric only tried to kill them. Eric turned them into lab rats. On purpose. Willingly. He'd said that it was nothing personal and maybe it wasn't, but probably it was. He had some personal vendetta (his nephew maybe? what it had cost his sister?) against the Awakened. If Katie wanted the cure for him, she could pry it from Sid's cold dead fingers. Because that's the only way he could be helped, if they killed the Orphan to get to it.

He can't do that, though, and they watch what these people had planned for them happen to him in fast forward. Sid watches, cold, satisfied, as Eric is torn apart by the virus.

And then her head snaps up, facing away from them. "They're coming. Three of them, two men and a woman," she says, and she looks at the others. Five of them, one healthy, four in various stages of sickness, one of them not wholly on their side. She looks at Grace. "We need to get out of here before the fire starts." She says it mostly to jar Katie, to remind her that their time is limited - provided she did as she said she would. She doesn't wait for her, though, the woman can stay and die by her brother's mutilated corpse or leave with them. Sid got what she came for, even got a little extra.

Serafíne

Strange how they all react up there, marooned in a bloodspattered hallway while a man is consumed from inside himself. Sid puts herself between Sera and Katie and Sera's confused, muzzled, not entirely with it and -

- all of that, she'll remember later. Like Grace, Sera too starts to retch. Unless Grace, what comes up from her abused body is little more than blood leached from the tissue lining her stomach, her throat, spat back into her mouth to spatter the flood with Eric's life's blood as he - dissolves, is eaten from the inside out. It just gets worse and worse, a horror show. Sid's attention snaps away Lena goes to help Katie rise and Sera, well, Sera disintangles herself from Sid's arms, slips in the blood and goes down to one knee, staring at Katie and crying with her bloodied tears and finding the spike in her own pain and Katie's pain, the atomized world, the net that knits them together. Sera's tears are coming more quickly now and they are bloodied and blood tinged and the world is a whirring chaos and her heart is still beating, the pulse thready but loud in her ears. Lena reaches to help Katie stand and Sera brushes the tears away from her cheeks with the edge of her palm leaving bloody streaks behind on her ashen skin.

Reaches out, and offers Katie a hand.

"We have to go."

[Empathy projection: Katie. Hope Difficulty 5 +1 [sick] -1 practiced.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (1, 7) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Hydra

Despite everything, Lena offered Katie a shoulder to lean against, attempting to help the shocked and traumatized woman to her feet. But Katie pulled her arm back and shook her head, sliding in the spreading pool of blood as she crouched against the wall. She didn't speak. She just sat there, shivering and broken.

Then Sera offered a hand. Did more than that - reached out with her mind to offer the only form of comfort she was able to give. But it was no use - just as her effects had bounced off of Eric's shielded mind, so too did this one reflect away from Katie. The thing that someone had implanted into her brain - the thing that was meant to protect her - now kept her from receiving human connection.

She looked at Sera and shook her head slowly. Finally she mustered a few words. "I just need... a few minutes. With him. Go."

Some of the others were already making their way past the ruined corpse, but they were moving both toward the exit and the three people who were making their way quickly toward them. Three against five were decent odds, but how many of them were really capable of fighting, and what sorts of weapons did their enemies have?

It didn't matter. They were already there.

Only moments after Sid uttered her warning, three people appeared at the end of the hall, closing off the route to the exit. Two of them were unfamiliar: a man and a woman in their twenties, the former blond and the latter brunette. The man in the middle was Callum. All three of them had guns raised and pointed in their direction.

"Kathrine," Callum spoke without taking his eyes off of Sid and the others. There was a cold, venomous finality to the word. In his off-hand he held a phone, which he started to speak into, "I found them. We're at the..."

He stopped cold and stared at Katie, who'd pulled something round and palm-sized out of her pocket. I tiny LED light was flashing white just above where her thumb was pressed against what looked like some kind of trigger.

"Katie. If you let go, we'll both die."

Callum was trying to reason with a woman who'd just watched her last surviving family member get eaten alive by a disease they'd all unleashed onto the world.

Sid

Sera lets go and for a moment Sid stands there, watching her and watching over her. She's not going anywhere unless Sera and Lena and Grace are with her, but she will at least move to stand at the front. She will be their shield for now.

Because here they come. A man she's only seen on video and two others. Sid stands between them, hands clenched into white-knuckled fists at her side. Eric is the only one who has experienced what Sid is about to do, but Eric is a half-melted skeleton in a puddle of blood on the floor.

They may have guns, but these are Awakened Mages. The universe exists to be bent to their Will. And right now, Sid intends to bend Fate to hers.

[Unlucky Bastard: Entropy 2: Extending however long she can to get as many suxx as possible to target all three people: coincidental, -1 (hella practiced, thanks, people who are dicks to Shoshannah!)]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (1, 5) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Lena Reilly

She gets pulled away from and for some reason, in that moment, she looks hurt. Of course, she's not thinking clearly and there are a lot of things that could be (and are) running through her head. But she draws away, her jaw hardening when her offer to help has been rejected. She puts her hand against the wall and starts to walk.

But then, there is Callum. And there is--

Oh, who the fuck cares. THERE IS CALLUM.

She warned him. She really did. He chose to lie to her and to play on her good nature. And so where her hand leans, her fingers rise and fall in a thump.

Thump-thump, thump.

A beat. And she does it again. And she focuses on that beat, letting the heartbeat connect them all. Through time, through each other. She's making herself a conduit for surface thoughts to go from one person into her and through to someone else. Of course, one of those people is now dead. But when you're a Time mage, that's not so impossible. (Hey, what's a little more mental trauma in the sake of dishing some out?)

And so she shuts her eyes and opens her mind, attempting to connect past and present. Cold life and bloody death. Eric and Callum. Of course, she doesn't know there are Mind shields to deal with, but ah, well.

[Mind 2, Time 2. Diff 5+1 for sick -3 Quint to make diff 3, dumping WP in.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (5, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Serafíne

There's no connection. Something hard, finite, physical, technological in the between skin and skin and mind and mind and atom and atom, dividing Katie neatly from the ineffable and the infinite and then -

- more chaos. Someone just needs more time and other people have guns drawn and there's this strange, grim standoff in the once-sterile hallway around the corpse of the bright, animate man who thought his sister would get the joke about Sera's insane boots just a handful of weeks ago.

Sera does not remember getting back to her feet but somehow she's standing; she doesn't have the energy to say anything more to Katie than she said on one knee, blooded and sick-to-death, with an open hand and does not remember entirely how her mouth works except when the nausea overtakes her.

And now three people with guns are standing between them and the exit. Between Sera and the exit to this place.

Sera grits her teeth and shoves all her panic, her fear, her need-to-escape, right at the male stranger.

[Mind 2: empathic projection. Uh. Fear, on dude she recognizes. Dif: 5 +1 (sick) -1 (resonance appropriate) -1 (practiced)

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (4, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Grace

She gets a hold on herself. They don't have time. Certainly not enough time for her to fall apart. But then, Callum is there, and he's pointing a gun at them, and suddenly Grace really wishes she'd spent every weekend at Kalen's place learning how to use one.

Still, her fear doesn't stop her from engaging the man. "You... you did this," she says, and she means all of this. Lena and Sera drowning in blood and death, Eric being eaten alive. Not to mention her own tortures, or the future of a pandemic of Hydra. "How could you be so stupid?"

"You called it a masterwork. But it thinks it could do better. It's evolving, Callum. Look what your masterwork does," she says, and points to the bloody skeleton. "You'd see the whole world drown in blood before you'd be satisfied, is that it?"

Hydra

The air in the hallway grew charged with resonance as each of them in turn began to weave effects against the armed bioterrorists at the end of the hall. Having tried so many times to breach the minds of her captors and failed, perhaps Sera half expected her projection to dissolve on contact as it had moments before with Katie.

But no. She'd seen this man's thoughts before. And now her will struck his mind like a thunderbolt of fear and panic, giving the guard a brief taste of what she'd been living with since she'd arrived in this horrible place.

It worked.

"We have to get out of here!" he hissed in a panicked rush, and they'd all see the flash of anger pass across Callum's eyes (he still had not torn them away from the flashing orb in Katie's hand) as the blond man beside him turned and bolted away as fast as he could, running toward the door. He'd be out of the building in seconds.

Lena's effect was longer in the working. The world around her dimmed as she pulled on the threads of time, looking back into the last moments of Eric's death. Whatever had protected his mind before, it was gone, because Lena was able to sense and channel every horrible, visceral emotion surging through his mind in those final seconds.

But when she tried to channel them into Callum, she'd find the way blocked by what felt like a hard, heavy wall of iron. She'd have to try harder if she wanted to breach it.

Sid could feel the early workings of her effect coming together, but it wasn't yet strong enough to release onto the man and woman still standing at the end of the hall.

Grace, new to her powers as she was, had no such assaults. Nor did she have any weapons to protect herself with. But the fact that she didn't have a gun didn't stop her from confronting the man who'd done this to them all. And Callum? He still didn't look at her.

He was looking at that thing. And Katie was staring right back at him. As though everything they might need to say to each other could be said with a single look.

When Callum responded to Grace, his voice was soft and cold. "Do you really think I would unleash something like this without knowing exactly what it was capable of?"

At that moment, Katie smiled.

"Wouldn't your dad be proud."

Then she pulled her thumb off the trigger of the device in her hand, and in the same moment, Callum shot her. The bullet hit her in the center of her sternum, and blood began to bubble up from the wound as the thing in her hand emitted a hard sonic pulse. The people standing in the hallway would feel more than hear it - the way it moved through their bones and rippled the air.

All at once these things happened:

Katie slumped to the ground, dead, blood seeping out of her nose and ears.

Something exploded in the guns that Callum and the woman held, and the woman dropped hers with a cry as it burned her hand.

In the room next door, there was a sound of electrical devices and computers sparking and popping and shorting out. Anything electronic the mages were carrying with them sparked and died.

Callum's eyes rolled back into his head. His body convulsed as he dropped to the floor, blood seeping out of his ears and nose as it had with Katie. Something had burst inside of his head.

Then the lights in the hallway went out.

Serafíne

Then it is dark; everything is chaos. The background taste of ozone from the dead electronics is not enough to overcome the coil of bile and blood in the back of her throat but she is aware of it, and aware of the need to move.

Sera does not run. Cannot run, but jesus fuck she comes close to it. Charges for the door as fast as she can, aching and bleeding and no-longer-dying and also spent, exhausted, emotionally rendered.

[Run for the door. Dex + Ath -2]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 9, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Sid

Callum falls, the other man bolts, one remains. Sid winces at the sound, tries to ignore the feel of her phone fizzling out in her pocket. Then Sera is running, or charging at the door. Good. Good, get out, Sera. Go and don't look back.

Because Sid is moving forward now, slowly as she twists the fates around the man who is running away. With luck he'll find his shoes untied or the door stuck, barring his escape. Something something, there's always something.

[extending, +1 for distraction probably, dropping her last quint to lower the diff to 4, now targeting only the guy and releasing, so whatever suxx go to increasing his difficulties]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (2, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Lena Reilly

It's traumatic to experience someone's death in a very real sense. To have your mind connected to someone else's in the moments when it winks out is to experience the emotional trauma of their passing. And when it's as horrible as Eric's death was...well, let's just say that Lena's mind buckles under the weight of dying from disease. But it will all be worth it if she can deliver that pain, Eric Draven-style, onto the man who she hates so very much. More than anything on this world currently, and possibly everything in the next.

And thus, to say that she is frustrated when it doesn't happen, when she comes up against a mind shield...well, frustrated doesn't begin to describe it. Those thoughts jam up like traffic on an unexpectedly-closed overpass, an infinite-car pile-up on the Lena Mental Expressway. She screams, in anger and frustration and panicked fear and pure, utter rage.

It's mostly instinct that her hand keeps that Thump, thump-thump, thump beat up, albeit frenetically now, like a frenzied butterfly rhythm. Maybe this is how someone invented dubstep. Certainly, you would have to be this wacked in the head to come up with such a thing.

And so she finds out the next closest target that isn't her friends. And she unleashes it on them full-bore, probably with a triple dose of her own hatred and fear and pain.

[[Extending effect. Out of Quint, +1 diff from before for extension.]]

Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (1, 4) ( fail )

Grace

Her laptop and phone nestled into the bag on her shoulder popped and sputtered. On top of everything else, like a cherry, that.

Sera brushes past her, moving as fast as a nearly dead person can. And it's a damn good idea. Grace catches up to her, lends a hand, tries to help keep her up and running as much as she can.

"Come on, I'll get you to the car, lean on me if you need it."

Lena Reilly

[[Paradox]]

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

Lena Reilly

[[Soak?]]

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

Hydra

[Lena takes 1B on top of the 4L from the disease]

Hydra

Sera had the right idea in running for the door. Not long after she started her unsteady, shuffling run toward the exit, a disembodied and coldly mechanical voice announced over the speakers:

"Three minutes until disinfection protocol."

When the remaining woman heard this, she snapped her head up in panic. Looking around at the carnage before her, she hesitated a moment, then turned and ran back through the front room, making her way to the door.

On her way out, she'd trip over the prone body of her colleague, who'd slipped and cracked his head hard on the front desk in his panicked (and it would seem - very unlucky) escape attempt. He was alive, but unconscious.

In her frustration, Lena attempted to channel her effect onto the fleeing guard, but she missed her target entirely and the effect went off inside her own head, cracking down with a horrible shock of psychic pain that radiated inside of her skull. For a brief, fleeting moment, she'd feel everything she'd intended Callum to feel.

Then it washed away, and she was left in a dim hallway with her friends urging her to leave.

They all go. And however they make their way toward the door, they'd find their path open. The three drugged guards in the lab were still unconscious, as was the one now sprawled on the floor. The woman was just disappearing out the door and into the parking lot. Wherever the rest of Hydra was, they hadn't yet made it to the lab.

Lena Reilly

When she couldn't directly pass on the dying sensation of Eric, she'd screamed. When it bounces back like a rubber band directly into her brain and goes off like a psychic shrapnel-filled IED, she slams herself against the wall and her mouth opens, but no scream comes out. It's like she's been shot straight through the lungs and would cry out in horror if she could, but lacks the capacity to do so.

It scatters away quickly enough though, leaving shadows behind that she'll have to sort out later. She doesn't have anything left to throw up, but her body is certainly trying as she straightens herself, staggering blindly forward after her friends, running on pure animal survival instinct.

Serafíne

Sera accepts Grace's help. Needs it, really. Whatever it is that is keeping her together at this point - will, perhaps - has started to desert her and there's something ragged and terrible about the way her wasted body moves, Sera who is also so entirely in-her-skin, self-assured and sensual and so many other things.

The terrible, shuffling run and Grace on one side and then run into the prone body of a man while a disembodied voice, cold and metallic, chills through the speakers. Sera breaks a bit away from Grace as they are passing the prone body of the man she tried to scare into fleeing - did scare into fleeing - almost literally trips over him and starts - shaking more, and crying, and cursing.

Shit oh shit oh shit,

she's saying, shit oh shit

barely keeping it together, shaking so powerfully and imploring Grace, "We can't leave him. This place is going to [b]burn[/b]."

Sera grabs one of his arms and starts trying to drag the unconscious man toward the door.

Sid

She did it. Katie did what she said that she'd do. In three minutes this place is going to lock itself down and burn itself apart from the inside. Just like the virus created within its walls was designed to do. Just like what these people wanted to do to Sid, Sera, Grace, and Lena.

Sid wants them all to die, all of them, every last one. Every person who had a hand in this place and what it did to her friends, she wants them dead, dead, dead. That kind of hatred should scare her, but it doesn't. She was never the mouse people thought she was.

But she can't stop to make sure that all of these people get what they deserve. Lena's still back, and as much as Sid would like to stay and kick in Callum's chest cavity with her booted foot, her first and only priority is getting her friends out to safety. So she goes back, peeling out of her sweatshirt as she goes back, throws it around the Ecstatic's shoulders, giving her something to hold so she can safely urge her toward that door.

Where Sera is trying to drag a man toward the door. Sid reaches for her arm as she guides Lena forward and past her. "Sera you can't we have to go." Her voice breaks on the last word, breaks for Sera not for the man, Sid could not care less about the man. Tears well up in her dark eyes, threatening to spill over her cheest but she blinks them back, no no, not yet. She has to get Sera, her friend, who wants to save even one of these people who did this terrible thing to her, Sera who has that kind of forgiveness in her. She has to get her and they have to run.

Grace

Grace goes wide-eyed at Sera, as she -- even at her worst of health -- starts trying to drag a full-grown man out the door.

"Sera, we can't! I'm sick, you're sick. There's no way we can move him... Aww hell! We're not going to make it as it is!"

She and Sid both try to dissuade her, but Grace decides that a bit of physical urging is needed. She tries to grab Sera's hand, tries to drag her out of the building.

Serafíne

It's not forgiveness, just humanity. Grace isn't helping, just dragging her away and now Sera is pulled open, Grace tugging her from the unconscious stranger, Sera shaking, crying, struggling to pull a full grown man she wouldn't be able to drag at her healthiest and cannot begin to budge, with one hand.

"Wake up!"

Frustrated, the work is a lashing, visceral thing, an urgent push as his unconscious mind.

[Mind 2. Dif: 5 + 1 (sic) -1 resonance appropriate. -1 quint. ]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (6, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Hydra

"Two minutes until disinfection protocol."

The truth was, if they all tried, they could probably get the guy out the door before the building locked itself down. But Lena was in no shape to help, and Sid and Grace weren't likely to want to risk their lives to save a man who'd wanted them dead. Who'd stood by and allowed them to be effectively tortured by this disease.

It would seem that Sera was the only one among them willing to offer the unnamed man any kind of forgiveness. Or maybe she'd just had enough of death and misery for one lifetime.

It was probable that this man did not deserve her help. But forgiveness wasn't only about the other person. Sometimes it was just about holding on to your humanity.

So Sera did the only thing she could think to do. She lashed out with her mind... and woke the man up.

He sat up with a shock, gasping in breath. There was panic and confusion in his eyes as he scrabbled to his feet, nearly slipping and falling again in the process. It was a small mercy that he was too much in the throes of the fear that had been projected onto him to think to attack any of them. Instead he just ran for the door.

Serafíne

There's almost nothing left inside Sera as the working takes effect, jolts the man from unconsciousness to scramble to his feet and run. He takes off going past them and Sera is absolutely, utterly spent. Would not be able to move if Grace were not pulling her along behind. Would not, perhaps, remember how or why to move.

But Sid urges and Grace pulls and there is no longer an unconscious man between Sera and freedom, doomed to some terrible death-by-fire. So: move she does, at last,

crying, yes. All the way.

Grace

Sera wakes the man, and Grace supports her, tries to keep her moving. Well, now there is no dead-weight to drag out the door, but Sera's not moving without encouragement.

Grace doesn't cry. Oh maybe she will later, when the enormity of the situation and her life comes crashing down. But she doesn't cry now. Maybe she would, if Sera didn't need her to be the strong one, to be a person to lean on.

She just keeps going.

"Just a little bit more. We're almost there."

Sid

[WP to not kill a dude. Down three from expenditures.]

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

Lena Reilly

Man? What man? Lena, frankly, doesn't see any man. There might be a time where, if she did see him, she might help. That time might even be now, if she were cognizant and capable. She did try to help Katie up. But she's neither capable nor really all that cognizant of anything, and so she just keeps stumbling for the door, urged onward by Sid.

Once she's outside, she doesn't really bother to check her surroundings. She feels fresh air and it's barely six steps outside the door before her legs are failing her. She makes it as far as Sid can guide her--perhaps even to the car--before she's on her hands and knees on whatever surface she's on or pushed to, and then on laying on her side. She doesn't sigh in relief, doesn't thank anything for being alive. Doesn't cry, doesn't ask questions, doesn't talk. She just lays there, or leans there if nudged into a sitting position against something, with a deeply distant and faraway look.

Sid

That man hurt them. Sid doesn't know how much, she doesn't know what he may or may not have done down in the rooms below, but his connection to them is enough. He is guilty by his association with his maniacs. He is guilty of hurting people just to hurt them. Of trying to kill them. Sid knows what it's like to suffer at the hands who take joy in the pain of others. She has the scars to prove it.

She has a quiet, simmering fury to prove it.

Sera wants that man saved so badly she would risk her own life to make sure he got out. In the end that's all that saves him. It's all that stops Sid from jumping on him as soon as he stands up, all that keeps her from stomping down with all her might onto his ankle, hoping to break it, hoping to hobble him and trap him in here. Death by fire is too kind.

Instead, Sid stands behind Sera, fists clenched at her sides, her whole body shaking with the desire to snuff out that tormentor. Her eyes track the man as he goes, and for a moment Sid is too furious to move. He's getting away, he's going to get away and live his life as though none of this ever happened while they live with the scars, the memories, the pain and hurt.

Only when Sera and Grace and Lena are nearer the doors does Sid finally force herself to move. She passes a hand over her face as she moves, one step, two steps, three, suddenly stiff limbs loosening with each step until she's running, hurling herself out of the building with a strangled cry of grief and rage. She doesn't stop, doesn't turn to look back, doesn't turn to look for the two that escaped. They may have to deal with them later, but first they have to get away from this place.

She heads for the car that brought them here, thankful that Katie left the keys behind for them. She doesn't look at the others as she makes sure the doors are all unlocked, and they're free to go. Unless there are very strong objections, Sid will take them all to Luke's.

Hydra

The clock was counting down. Time running out. But there was the door just ahead, and one by one (or two by two) they all made their way past it and out into the crisp late-October air. Outside the sun had gone down, and the parking lot was dark and empty apart from Katie and Eric's Audi and the back of a black van that was presently peeling its way onto the road.

They were getting away.

Sometimes in life, there were no clean endings.

A minute and a half after Sid let the glass door slide shut behind her, the locks on the building clicked shut, moved by some automated protocol. For a moment, everything was still.

Then the door and the windows shattered, exploding outwards in a bright cloud of flame. Inside, bodies of those living and dead roasted. Electronics melted and scorched. Paint peeled from the walls and dissolved in the heat. Glass vials popped.

The building burned. The virus burned.

Turned out it was fire that killed the Hydra after all.