Sometimes it feels like Sera is hibernating. Right? Curling up close to home, resting, recovering. Bright but contained, always happy to see him. A week and change, more or less, for her physical recovery. Sometimes he finds her in the garden, and swinging in her hammock, nevermind the weather, wrapped up in coat and seven layers of blankets, at least until the weather starts minding her and the temperature falls well below freezing and stays there, and the snow flies. Sometimes he finds her in her room, curled up in the chair-shaped-chair, her clothing scattered on the floor beneath her feet, a book of poetry open in her lap, although it never seems like she's reading, or her guitar close at hand, although it never seems like she's been playing, either. Sometimes Dan builds a fire in the fireplace in the living room and the housemates are coming and going and Sera is sitting on the spine of the couch, watching a glowing, painted twilight come to claim the last shreds of a late fall day.
Sometimes there are strangers there, or people that Hawksley also knows, and Sera chat with them from a benevolent sort of distance that could feel like grace, but does not feel precisely like a Sera.
There are rumors about what happened ricocheting back and forth between their many mutual acquaintances. Most settle on the theory that Serafíne is recovering from an unintentional overdose.
She does nothing to dispel the speculation.
--
Small pleasures. The crackle of the fire, the humming simplicity of a day falling into dusk, the warmth of a porcelain mug fragrant in hand. The bright, soaring immediacy of his presence when he comes to visit, the way she leans into whatever kiss of greeting or farewell he bestows on her temple or cheek, mouth or jaw when he comes to see her, or takes his leave. And if he wants to stay the night, oh, she will curl up in his arms,
and how she will shake. Here the cracks in her small and easy pleasures, the deep, rendering evidence of the damage done.
Sera confides in him. Tells him that she does not want to go to the chantry; does not want to hear anyone ask her how she is, all in chirruping inquiry; does not want to see anyone except the people who come seeking her, like pilgrims to a shrine. Like him. Except for a visit to Pan, in the early days, when she was still skeletal, sick, her breathing wet and clotted, her sputum blood-tinged, she sees no other magi except for him. Does not ask after them, does not listen to the messages left on Ginger, does not - in any way - seek them out.
Close to Thanksgiving, that changes. She had Dan drive her out on a whim, and saw Grace, so she tells him, looking away, the edge of a wry, sad sort of smile curving her mouth, before she looks back. And if he senses the spark of something heavier, wanting in her eyes, in the cusp of an inhale, as she looks at him just then, he would not be wrong.
Sera sends him home for Thanksgiving with a long, lingering hug and a chaste sort of kiss that could easily turn into anything. Rick and Dee have family in the area, but Dan won't go home and she and Dan have invites to Thanksgiving dinner at a gallery, opening day for an exhibit of contemporary American watercolors of turkeys, most of which (inexplicably or not) appear to depict George W. Bush. She sends him a selfie, holding up a glass of Nouveau Beaujolais in toast. She wants to ask him about his mom, is she okay, did he get to see her, but they're so far away in that moment that she doesn't quite know how.
--
Dee plays a mean game of Scrabble, Hawksley has discovered. Beneath the blushing and sometimes bruised exterior, a bright and sharp mind, with a command of quite nearly as many words (in English, at least) as he has. Sera sometimes starts the game, too, the three of them arrayed around the table smack in the center of the warm, bright kitchen, or clustered around the end of the dining room table, the room all worn, warm wood, the array of liquor bottles on the tall boy and buffet far less chaotic than usual, if only because they do not need to be replaced with quite the same frequency.
Sera starts the game, but never finishes. She gets bored by the tiles arrayed on the wooden holders, or frustrated, or maybe there's a text chiming in on her phone, or the kettle singing in the kitchen, so she wanders off and they give her a ritual round and then cannibalize her tiles, return them back to the velvet bag. Give her few poor points as a libation to the word-gods and keep going. Sera usually wanders back, before the game ends. So she does today, a steaming, fragrant mug of Darjeeling cradled between her hands for warmth. Wanders back in, leans a hip against the table, and sips her tea just as Dee plays REQUEST over a triple-word score for 101 points. The feat is remarkable enough that even Sera takes note, and whistles beneath her breath. Then nudges his arm aside, because she wants to sit in Hawksley's lap, sipping from her mug of whiskey-spiked tea, with his arms all around her like wings, while he finds a way to win that game, even so, because -
- he's fucking magic, isn't he?
HawksleyWell, it is winter.
In fall, a season of decay, Serafine took ill. She took very, very ill, indeed. She has not spoken of it in depth, and Hawksley has only the vaguest understanding. He does not lurk on Ginger very much, and it was not until someone mentioned that Sera was fucking missing that he got on a jet, returned to the United States, threw his will against the walls stopping him from finding her, only to -- not very long after -- be told that she was recovering at some doctor's office or something. A long time has passed and he still does not know much more than that, and he has not asked.
When her body seemed stronger, and she'd gained back some weight, he thought about it. When he heard from her housemates that she went out drinking and got completely trashed, he thought maybe she was returning a little bit to normal, but a couple of nights later he saw her again and slept with her again and she shook like that still, trembling like she was freezing half to death, and he decided not to. He rubbed his nose against the back of her neck and held her a little tighter and told her she was keeping him awake, which even she knew was a lie. For one thing: that wasn't why his eyes were staying open long into the night. For another: he did, after all, sleep just fine that night.
--
Hawksley does not spend every waking moment at Sera and Dan's house. He came more often at first, a few times a week. Then less, and now it will be a couple of weeks in between visits at times, but he still comes. He doesn't ask a lot of questions, and it isn't because he doesn't care because he's here isn't he and it's not because he isn't curious because he is Hawksley and of course he is curious. But he leaves it alone.
Fall was a season of decay. Of rot.
Winter is a season for stasis, for dormancy. Even as brightly shining and stratospherically soaring as Hawksley is, his soul understands that cycle better than many. There is no sin, according to the laws of his conscience and his soul, in hibernation.
But he doesn't get the feeling that Sera's soul feels the same way.
--
They are lying in bed and she is pillowed on his arm and his chest and he is warmwarmwarm and the blankets are thickwarm and he wants to have sex with her but he is not saying anything about that because it's not like it's news, and they are talking.
And she confesses that she doesn't want to go to the chantry, and she confesses the reasons why, and he gives her a half-smile, understanding. He doesn't tell her that she'll get over this, though he thinks she will, and he doesn't tell her that he gets it, because he thinks she knows, and she saw him in Vegas with all those people clapping for his mother and treating him like a son and she hated them for it and she saw in his eyes that maybe it's a good thing that he is not as powerful as he will be soon, because it didn't put him in the greatest mood either.
They do get each other sometimes. Sometimes in the darkest of ways, in the bleakest of spaces, they just understand.
Of course he understands why she doesn't want to go to the goddamn chantry right now.
--
Thanksgiving. Heh.
Hawksley is in town. He does not go east. Sera sends him home though, thinks she does maybe because she assumed but he doesn't tell her this lie because -- frankly -- he legitimately can't lie to her, with that lingering hug and that chaste kiss and later, a photo from her phone, and he gets it belatedly, because when she sends it he has the head of a grad student named Jonathan in his lap and his toes are curling and his teeth are together. Which is a perfectly fine way to spend the holiday, he thinks.
--
Since he met her, Hawksley has liked Dee. When he discovered that she could and would actually challenge him at Scrabble, he only liked her more. By their fourth round, she gives him cupcakes; he slaps the board on the table with a steely gaze and tells her not to change the subject.
They let Sera join, but it's clear early on that this is a battle, and it's a very nerdy battle, and it's about as interesting to an outside viewer as staying around Hawksley's hotel room to watch him read books all night. Tonight he has his elbows on the table, his hands laced with a roughened grace and obscuring his mouth, staring at the board and Dee in slow succession.
R - E - Q - U - E - S - T
"Oh, fuck you!" he says, throwing his hands up and leaning back from the table, exhaling heavily and glowering without -- alright, with only a little -- malice at the baker.
Sera is back. And moves into his lap, and though he is intent on defeating her housemate now in a way that charges the room with that summer-sky, summer-storm energy of his, this is comforting. His arm winds around her hips and his hand settles on her waist and he shifts her, just a bit, out of his view so he can savage the board. Barely. Just barely, for Dee rallies after a couple of turns of being trounced, and they run out of tiles before the two of them march outside to settle this like cavemen.
Hawksley, though he has now only beaten Dee one out of four times, grins like the cocky motherfucker he is. Leaning back, Sera still on his lap with her Darjeeling, gets her hip gently pinched, because he is also a son of a bitch.
"What are all of you doing for Christmas, anyway?"
SerafíneDee's often charming, sometimes infuriating self-consciousness deserts her entirely in the midst of battle. She looks Hawksley straight in the eye and flashes all those white teeth in that particularly crimson mouth and laughs a throaty laugh, her eyes glittering with a brilliant sort of challenge and that brightness is not quite avian from her but there is still a mildly predatory spark about her. Something new in the way she moves as they game progresses.
REQUEST though god she fairly glows, gives a wordless shout and a coruscant grin and a vaguely profane gesture that ends with a snap of her teeth when he exclains fuck you and she tells him to "Bring it!" with the sort of bruising cockiness one expects from a Derby Doll, at least in the rink.
Dee actually boogies a bit in her chair and offers Hawksley another cupcake like that might actually distract him and then Sera, in his lap, pliable enough to be moved easily out of his view of the board, resting her temple against his shoulder, her spine curved, watching the game peripherally as they move, or rather, watching Dee across the game board, her cheeks pink and flushed, not from self-consciousness but with the spike of adrenaline in her blood, all those competitive hormones. God, she's lovely.
So is he, coruscant just like Dee. Burning, burning, the snap-crackle of his mind and body.
"You fucking bastard," Dee is saying, grinning too, shaking her dark head as she surveys the board, shaking her head over the end game, playing it and replaying it in her mind, her eyes darting between the tiles and Hawksley. "How you managed that - " The sheer admiration in her voice and manner might go to another man's head but he is Hawksley and hardly gives a fuck about what other people think about him.
A sharp sigh from Dee, of quiet disbelief over the outcome as Hawksley leans back and Sera shifts in his lap, lifting her chin enough to give her line-of-sight back to her housemate, too lazy to lift her head from Hawksley's shoulder. Too lazy, at least until he pinches her hip and she objects, "Hey - !" and wiggles her ass and lifts her chin, the bridge of her nose braced against his jawline. Mutters, "you son of a bitch," against his skin because he is one, as Dee starts to tell him about her Christmas plans -
"Oh, my mother and stepfather have a thing. My sister and brother-in-law will come down from Cheyenne and a couple of cousins will be there, too. Maaaybe. It's cool, you know. Just the family thing. What about you?"
Somewhere in there Sera flashes a grin, wry, that he can feel rather than see. "I'll probably dress up real pretty and go to church. I never did get to wear my Halloween costume."
HawksleyIn answer to Dee, all Hawksley does is blow a puff of air on his fingernails, buffing them his tailored t-shirt with its expensively distressed graphics. This hand follows the other, arm wrapping like its twin around Sera's waist. For all that his musculature is agile and athletic, there is a great degree of sheer strength in it, a surprising heaviness and firmity of his arms where they hold her. Perhaps she's gotten used to it by now; he's slept beside her enough times that he knows her smell. She may know his body.
Even if he's a son of a bitch. He just smiles, and tips his head with the way she nuzzles or leans against him, eyes briefly closing. Opening again, as Dee answers. "Cheyenne's not even a real place," he declares, beside the point, and does not answer her question because Sera says she's going to church.
He raises an eyebrow. "I'll pay you if you go as an angel."
SerafíneSera forgets his strength until she remembers it again, until she's in his lap and the game is over and he is sliding another firm, solid arm around her waist.
Sera always forgets these things until she remembers them again. Until she remembers him again, as she is remembering him now. The tension of that remembering all live wire in her frame, in the curl of her spine and in the wind of his arms. Each breath he takes lifts her shoulder where it is wedged against his chest.
When she looks up at him then - the dark surface of her eyes gleaming with the reflective flicker of the bulbs from the chandelier - she sees him both here and then, both now and there, propelling himself furiously forward, water sluicing down his broadly muscled back.
Hawksley declares that Cheyenne is not a real place and Dee, she laughs with this note of agreement burring the back of her throat and there's a bit of cross-talk that gets lost - "My sister's not really a real person, either. Brother-in-law's a mining engineer and she's pregnant so she more or less literally has two point five four - "
And Sera's not really paying attention to Dee anymore, except to the lovely alto inflection of her voice which marries with the fading warmth of the mug in her hand and the solidity of Hawksley's bicep against her spine and the murmur of music too faint to be distinguished somewhere through the solid walls of the old brick home. Her eyes are on the edge of his jaw, the scruff of his artfully groomed beard as he promises to pay her if she goes as an angel.
"How much?" Sera's teeth flash. Her eyes are back on him and she's pulling her head back a bit the better to meet both his eyes and there's just the edge of an inhale, not really time enough for him to answer her inquiry before she's agreeing, see, quiet and intent -
"Come with me and I will."
HawksleyHawksley is not easily categorized. And he is not a protector. When he holds Sera a little tighter, or stays awake a little while after she falls asleep, he is not thinking about keeping her safe, about watching over her. This isn't how he defines himself. Hawksley does not talk, except in glib, flippant comments, about how he defines himself. But glibly spoken or not spoken at all, he primarily cares about himself, and he expects others to do the same.
When he wraps his arms around her, it is because it feels good to do so, and he does not question it overmuch. After Vegas, he has not questioned many things at all. He has lost himself in study, to the point that he may as well have dropped off the face of the earth but for the visits he makes to see Serafine.
Study is what brings him closer to who and what he knows he is meant to be.
Nothing else, even the most valued of friendships, does that for him. Not in any way he can see.
--
If it had been him, he probably would have let those people die. He doesn't know that Sera nearly got herself killed trying to keep such a thing from happening, because they haven't talked. At all, really. Not about whatever it was that happened to her. Not about anything else going on.
They talk about things like Scrabble and Christmas plans and church and her housemates and Collins.
--
He shrugs at her question; there is no other answer given. He's not that gauche.
Okay: he is. But he pretends, at the moment, not to be, and smirks at her. "I'll have to have Collins check my calendar," he says, which is another way of saying HA
HAHAHAHAHA
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
no.
Not even if she dresses like an angel.
--
Dee excuses herself, to put the Scrabble board away or because the door rings or she is starting to become invisible in the corona of gut-wrenching, soul-searing brilliance that these two emit each on their own, nevermind when they're together.
And when she does, though he would have done it anyway, Hawksley kisses her. There's no hesitance in it. There is quite a bit of heat.
SerafíneSera's mug of tea, half-full of Darjeeling and half-full of whiskey, is sitting on the dining room table - which is a lovely piece, dark and antique and heavy - between the Scrabble board and the edge. Dee started to clean up the tiles, to pick them up and slide them into the little velvet bag they came in, but something about the body language between Sera and Hawksley - the way she looks at him, the way he smirks at her, the way their resonance twines, that gravitational pull between and around them - has her leaving those things behind. Maybe she says something about the door or a call she needs to make or excuses herself to get a drink. Whatever: it hardly matters. Neither Sera nor Hawksley are paying much attention to her except for this: there is enough of a farewell in her voice that Sera tips her head back to watch Dee exit the room.
--
Sera is looking away from Hawksley when he smirks and tells her that he is going to have Collins check his calendar. Not entirely away - it was just the halo of Dee's movement in her peripheral vision, something brief and passing. Her profile is sharp against the shadows of the dining room, the antique brocade wallpaper glowing with the reflected light of the chandelier. There is something compartmental about that look, away from him, just a little bit distant, as if she were watching herself live within her body rather than actually doing it.
Sera is not drunk or high. She is maybe a little bit tipsy, if only because the last few weeks and months - the illness, the imprisonment, the recovery, all of it - has rather lowered her prodigious tolerance. She has not spoken to him about any of it, and sometimes it is on her tongue and sometimes it is in her skin and sometimes it is buried in her body and sometimes in her lungs and sometimes it all lives in some wrenching echo in the theater of her mind and on some level she has no idea what to say to him about it, or how or why or when.
And on another level she thinks she knows all she needs to know:
which is that he's here. Drinking Scotch with Dan, playing Scrabble with Dee, kissing her -
kissing her.
There's a kind of muscle memory for this, built into the frame of her body. The kiss catches her on the cusp of an inhale so she is both hungry and air-hungry from the start, opening her mouth to his, shifting her body in his lap to start to straddle him, and she's reaching up with her calloused hands to cup his face, entirely reverent, as if this were the gesture with which one might begin a prayer: human contact, skin-to-skin.
Sera inhales the breath from his lungs and keeps on kissing him until the need to breathe overwhelms every other demand and direct of her body.
Then she breaks the kiss abruptly still leaning / looking up at him, brow to brow, nose to nose, mouth to mouth. Sera is panting for breath, these sharp, pizzicato little jerks of her shoulders, the tension in her body sudden and wholly lacerating.
Then her mouth finds his again. The kiss is a furious, driving thing, she is rising up to her knees so that she can bear down on him, hold him still, hold his mouth to hers She's still panting, Sera, and makes this noise that sounds like half-a-sob.
God she wants him.
She had forgotten how much.
HawksleyHe was going to move her farther onto her lap if she didn't get herself there. As it is, Hawksley -- ever-so-smart, Arabic-speaking, globe-trotting Hawksley -- remembers to pluck the mug from Sera's slender hands before she drops it behind him or something ridiculous like that. His hands go to her hips, then, as she's straddling him, and move her closer. He has forgotten how to play Scrabble, or even what Scrabble is. That is, of course, in part because it's just Scrabble.
Sera is close and hungry from the moment he puts his mouth on her, and he is surprised. He feels her drinking the very air out of his lungs and his hands crawl up her back, pulling her closer, yes, even closer.
She stops. She's panting. She's shaking a bit, and then kissing him, harder now, furiously, leaning over him like some sort of predator cat who has rediscovered her own appetite and found a freshly-caught morsel laid out for her. This is when Hawksley stops her. That sound from her throat, that bone-shaking noise and the fact that her body is shaking all around those bones of hers, still a little too prominent for his liking, and he doesn't gently soothingly tenderly ease her back but pulls his head back from hers, putting his hands on her, firmly, stilling.
One on her waist.
One lifting up to her arm, but that one is softer.
He looks at her, his brow a little furrowed, thinking, perhaps reading some other language written on the insides of her skull and he can see through her eyes to read it, like they're magnifying glasses.
After a while, he says: "I want you to talk to me about what happened," and it's quiet, but his eyes are piercing and considering as they always are, "but if you want to go upstairs and have sex first," if that would help, "that's okay, too."
SerafíneWhen you start kissing Sera, you're not supposed to stop. Isn't that one of the rules? Isn't that part of the bargain she's made with the universe?
He does, though: pulls physically, firmly away from her and stays her and her breath is coming in short quick bursts and there's a dull flush of blood beneath her skin and something feral and hungry in the stark twist of her body beneath the grip of his staying hands.
Sera is dressed as he has often found her these past few weeks: in boxers and a t-shirt and little else. They keep the house warm and there are blankets and throws scattered around the house in which she can wind herself when she settles someplace, for a minute or an hour. Her thighs are sleek against his thighs and her breasts move with each short audible breath beneath the screen-printed silhouette of some obscure late-70s post-punk band: a pair of women twined around each other with an explosion of wild hair haloing their heads.
And he looks at her, studies her from that remove and that dull flush deepens beneath her skin, not especially visible because she is not remotely pale and her eyes are shining, shining, and she has the wild, absurd, immediate conviction that she does not want him to see her, which is followed and subsumed by an equal surety that she wants him to see everything. So she stares back at him, her dark eyes bruised by a particular mixture of vulnerability, want, and defiance.
Sera keeps breathing shallowly, straddling him on the dining room chair, her knees planted on either side of his muscular thighs and she can feel his hand firm on her waist and gentler on her arm and the truth is he needs both hands to hold her back, to make her still in the first handful of heartbeats when he pulls away from her mouth because she wants, she wants, she always wants.
Doesn't she.
But he watches her and she stares right back at him and her breathing is coming under control, deeper, steadier.
He wants her to talk to him about what happened.
Sera closes her eyes then. Not to avoid his piercing gaze but because she needs find her own core, and - eyes closed - she smiles, this tenuous half-smile that curves across her mouth and then melts, like spun-sugar in the rain.
Her eyes open. "I wanna tell you, too," she says, and some of the whipcord tension leaves her core as she shifts her weight back, glancing behind them toward the dining room door. Then she's rising from his lap. "We should go upstairs anyway. It's not something they should overhear."
--
So they go upstairs. Her room, the chaos of her things, the warm nest of her big bed, which is wrapped in creamy white linens and a soft, ivory duvet. The oversized chair by the windows framing a view of the bare limbs of the oak in the backyard. Empty of its usual load of Sera's clothes, because she spends so much time these days curled up in it, staring at the sky.
They close the door behind them.
Sera chooses the bed over the chair. Pushes the tangled sheets out of the way and settles cross-legged close to the headboard, watches him as he follows her across the room. Thinks, perhaps, about the way he changes the molecules in the air around him. The way they churn.
Part of her does want to have sex first.
"I suppose I should start at the beginning."
HawksleySera made a bargain with the universe. The universe, however, did not think to check with Hawksley.
Hawksley, thus, is unaware of Sera's bargains and a bit purposefully unaware of some of the universe's other rules. He is not purposeful at all in his ignorance of what it means when her eyes flash that way or this, what it means when her cheeks are pink and hot or what all those mottled things in her eyes are: the want and the defiance he recognizes. The vulnerability is harder for him. It would be. After all: he's a sky god, an ancient king, son of Life and Death. Those raptor's eyes of his, blue and mortal but somehow inhuman and inhumane, can see far and clear but do not delve under the surface.
So he sees her, not realizing for a moment that she doesn't want him to, and he sees her, but not everything.
--
He relaxes a bit when she admits she wants to tell him, too. Oh, good. She's not going to start like, screaming at him or crying or something. So that's good.
Sera starts to rise, and Hawksley just gets up from his chair, gathering her up in his arms and she probably wraps her legs around his waist and his hands are quite firm and bizarrely chaste beneath her thighs to hold her up there, as she's saying the others shouldn't overhear. He just nods into her hair, then puffs air from his mouth to make her hair get out of his face so he can see his way out of the kitchen and up the narrow stairs.
"Duck," he says, when the ceiling gets low, though she probably already did.
--
In her room, with its chaotic assortment of Stuff where Hawksley feels simultaneously endeared and annoyed by the mess, he shuts the door with his heel and she helps him with her hand over his shoulder and he lets her down onto her bed, turning and thumping down beside her on the duvet.
His hands are in his lap. His back is not straight.
To what she says, he nods. "And when you get to the end: stop."
SerafíneSera makes this noise, though really it is almost soundless, the suggestion of sound, the implication of it rather than noise-itself: bemused. Start at the beginning; and when you get to the end: stop. Her eyes are on him then, and his direction earns him a spare sort of smile, which is all edged in shadow but gleams through the center.
Just gleams.
--
It is a long story.
He wants to hear it. So, she’s going to tell it all.
--
“Sid and I met for dinner at the Tap House,” is how it starts. The half-edged smile with which she favors him lingers at the edges of her mouth, though her gaze slips from him to the framing darkness of the wide windows overlooking the back yard. The curtains are open. The low light in the room reflects in the dark glass. They are framed there, not precisely but passingly, pale impressions against the shadow of a December night.
“This guy came up to us, the smarmy asshole sort, you know?” Of course he does. Doesn’t he masquerade as one of those-sorts most of the time? “Good looking, way too confident, all expectation, like you owe him for his interest in whatever the fuck he’s about to say. Too many goddamned teeth in his smile. He was asking me about my fucking boots and I was needling him because he just felt like an asshole, and everything about him felt sheened and false and only those little sparks of irritation he couldn’t quite hide when I hit a nerve seemed real, and Sid was all quiet and acting weird but you know her,” – though in this Hawksley may not know her. He has never seen Sid-the-mouse, just Sid-the-lion, or at least, Sid-the-lion-cub - “she just gets weird sometimes around strangers, so I didn’t think anything of it. And I could tell I’d gotten under his skin and he gave up and left and it wouldn’t’ve been remarkable or memorable except after he left the bar, Sid and I both got stung by an insect or something.
“In the fucking bar.
“And of course it wasn’t an insect. It was a something and Sid caught her something, this little insect robot – what the fuck, who makes an insect robot, right? - and Sid told me that something like that had happened to Lena and Grace the night before, which was why she was so paranoid. Infected them with something and they were starting to get sick.
“So you know, I checked. Sure enough there it was, already in my bloodstream. Sid too.
“So, we left. Sid wanted to go home and start… studying it or whatever. She told me we’d be infectious, but only if people were exposed to our blood. I was feeling okay so I went back to the Tap House and took at look back at Eric and the bar. Just to see what he’d been doing before we showed up, and where he went after. Figured out that he was waiting for us, specifically for us, that injecting us with that shit turned him the fuck on, that he had some sort of a mind shield going and no magic, and got the license plate of his get away car.”
A spare half-smile. Sera does not know that this came to nothing. A rental, untraceable. It just felt like a sort of victory at the time. Something she could do instead of merely suffer. Her positions on the bed shifts, then – she uncrosses her legs and draws her knees upward, wraps her arms around her calves and thighs, bare toes curling in the soft luxury of the duvet. She is quiet for some time, just breathing, slowly and deliberately, making space in the cavity of her chest for what was, and what will be.
“Dreamt that night about a hydra. And when I woke up I was sick. Achy and feverish, and I kept getting nosebleeds and unless it’s a hangover I don’t do sick well so I healed myself. Felt like I was pretty much cured by the time I called you.”
She finds his eyes then. Her own gaze cutting up from her curling toes to meet his, with that unfettered directness that can be so provocative, so challenging, so demanding in some circumstances. It is just raw now. A shadow of guilt, a soupcon of pain, a ribbon of adoration.
“Remember? ‘Cos you know fucking everything. Maybe I should’ve told you what was going on, but it made me happy that you were really far away from it. Having a good time in Barcelona. Made me happy to hear your voice, right in my ear, from so fucking far away.”
Sera drops her arms from around her legs; spreads her hands wide on either side of her hips and pulls herself up higher against the headboard.
“So it turns out, the virus really was like a fucking hydra. Two heads right, for every one that got cut off. Science and shit.” Sera gives him a small, dismissive, ragged looking shrug, and drops her chin to rest it on the apex of her rather nobby knees. “I was sick again the next morning. Really sick. Nosebleeds, fever. Then I started coughing up blood. Infectious blood, right? And everyone here – I didn’t want them to get sick, and what the fuck was I going to do, go to the hospital?
“I just locked the door. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“It kept getting worse. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t keep anything down. I started having these hallucinations. I was drowning in blood, and this cold, implacable eye was just watching me die.
“I don’t know what happened after that. I fell asleep or passed out, or something.”
Sera looks up at last; at Hawksley, briefly, and then at the ceiling and then at the walls and each one merits the weight of her gaze for a heartbeat or three, like she’s taking their measure. Her expression is close and pained and more than a little bit dark but this is not precisely the part that haunts her.
“That was here. In my room.” This is not precisely the part that haunts her, but here the first silent tears fall. Sera gives Hawksley a tight little smile and reaches up to scrub them off her cheeks. “Dan did a lot of fucking work cleaning up all that blood.”
**
“When I woke up again, I was in a hospital room.
“I was locked in a hospital room."
**
“I was feeling better. Less verge-of, more antechamber-of-death, and I was hooked up to an IV, and there was one of those beeping kind of monitors and a hospital bed and whitewashed walls, but it also felt fucking weird. And the door was locked. And nobody answered me when I called.
“God I hate hospitals.” There is a shudder incipient in her body but Sera makes herself meet his eyes again, and there is a sort of raw defiance written there. She hates them and hates that she hates them and shares that with him the way she shares a bruising, driving kiss. Smiles around the hate too because what else is there except the places where you’ve broken apart, and the places where you’ve put yourself back together. “Too much time in rehab, you know?”
It is almost rhetorical. It is a different sort of wound.
“This guy comes in. Eventually. Starts telling me that he knows the people who infected us, that he’s been watching them, and he’s trying to stop them and he wants to find a cure. Tells me that he rocked up to my house to ask how I was feeling or what the fuck ever. Offer me some aspirin. Give me a healing hug.
“Except I didn’t answer the door because I was fucking unconscious so he just decided to kidnap me or whatever. Take me back to his fake hospital. Stabilize me. And he’s telling me that he needs my blood in order to cure us and he can slow it down but not stop it until they come up with a cure and I know he’s a fucking liar, and I’m trying to get into his head and he’s not magic but there’s this blank fucking wall up, all static you know? White noise, and he just keeps lying to me, trying to get me to agree to my own imprisonment. To consent to his bullshit, you know?
“The door was open. I tried to run.
“I didn’t get very far.”
--
“When I woke up again, I was back in the hospital bed. IV in my arm. Which I tore the fuck out. Monitor beeping. Which I tore the fuck off.
“I looked back, you know? To see who had been there before and what happened to them. And oh, hey. Here was the asshole who wanted me to consent to the unalterable fact of my own imprisonment for reasons I could not begin to comprehend. Painting the walls of the goddamned room white along with the smarmy asshole who infected me in the first place, because when you decide to play rogue mad scientist and infect strangers with a malignant virus and kidnap them to your fucking facility to watch them die, you should probably make sure that the walls are pristine, hospital-grade white. Better aesthetics make you feel less like an asshole I guess. More like a savior of all mankind.
“See they were targeting us ‘cos they didn’t like magic. Like it was magic that killed the people they loved or hurt they fucking egos, and not assholes. Like a fireball was any different from a goddamned atom bomb.
“But yeah. No one came in the room after that. Not when I was awake. Like, I wasn’t about to sit in the bed like I was a fucking patient and pretend that any of this was okay. They’d wait until I was asleep, passed out in a corner, then come in and put me back in the bed. Take my blood and hook me back up. Inject me with things. Leave trays full of hospital food. Fucking magazines and newspapers.”
Sera’s throat is not as tight as she thought it would be. Maybe in the aftermath, in the telling, her fucking outrage is enough to dampen the deep, abiding yaw of her terror. The sheer absurdity of all those pretences at normality, at morality – god, they make her want to tear the place apart with her fucking eyeteeth.
“Days like that. Days and days like that. Getting sicker. Alone, while they watched me die. And the hallucinations, I can’t tell you how real they were. A dragon tore itself free of my stomach and started devouring me –
“And it all starts to run together. It’s all blurred and bloodied, and I guess they had Lena too, because I could feel her, you know? She started sending these like, empathic projections, or something, trying to keep me calm or make me okay. Which was fucking brave and generous and also kinda pisses me off and I don’t fucking know why. I mean you know later – at that doctor’s after, after you came for me, I went in to thank her because fuck it, she was spending her energy to try to help me when I was just breaking down and she said, one of us was getting out of there and I didn’t think it was going to be me. I don’t even know what to do with that. I can’t quite get myself off that goddamned hook.
“There was this woman who might’ve been a hallucination or a game or a – fuck, who tells me that she’s sorry, she’s sorry, she didn’t precisely get that they were attacking people, not monsters, and she’s gonna get me out of there, and Sid and cure. I could feel her pain, hanging in the air around her like a curtain. I guess her son had died in a sort of firefight. The Techs or something. I don’t fucking know. Not murdered – not directly.
“Collateral damage.
“Which is I guess what I was. Collateral damage.
“It was hard to believe her. I didn’t, really. She was gone and I could feel death in every corner of the room, the shadow of it swagged from the ceiling like crepe paper, or tulle. I couldn’t breathe. I was drowning in my own blood. I felt like I was dissolving and not the way I like to. Like I was being consumed. I knew it wouldn’t be long.
“Then the door opened and there was Sid. She made a fucking cure while I just –
“There was some kind of fight I hardly remember. The guy who infected me was there. He was sick too. But worse, and his skin just kind of sloughed off, melting into a pool of his own blood. Sid and Grace brought me to that doctor’s office.
“Next thing I knew, there you were.”
--
By the time the story ends, there are tears in Sera’s eyes and gleaming on her cheeks. So: she’s crying by not crying. The tip of her nose is a little bit red and her sinuses are starting to run, her shoulders are knit forward, painfully tight, her arms vise-like around her knees. And she’s not looking at him and she’s not avoiding his eyes and she’s mostly seeing into the past, feeling the shadows of the room run red with it, her throat raw. Surprised that she’s not drowning. Sometimes she doesn't remember how to do anything but drown.
“Here you are.”
HawksleyIf they were in the story those words came from, it would make Hawksley the King of Hearts, and Sera the White Rabbit. There's some humor in that. He leans over, thinking of it, and kisses her temple, softly. His eyes close and his brow rests there against her crown for a moment, all meant in encouragement to go on, perhaps solidarity or acceptance or something. Because well-read young man that he is, he can see a long story coming a mile off.
And this will be a long story.
--
She leads him from the Tap House down a horrific, blood-splattered rabbit hole, and for most of the story, Hawksley is very still. He is watching her closely with those raptor's eyes, tracking every faint movement as though he is spotting a mouse running for its life in pitch dark. His hands are folded, and though their form speaks more of power and strength than anything else, there's a certain intellectual elegance in the way he holds them.
When she gets to the bit about the hydra, about the call she placed to him, he sees the pain more than the adoration and it furrows his brow. She didn't tell him, and she was happy that he was far away and having a good time in Barcelona. His brow is smoothing, his eyes aching, when she says it made her happy to hear his voice, even though he was across an ocean and lying in the sunlight somewhere.
He feels like he's always lying in the sunlight. No wonder it makes so much sense to picture him in places like Barcelona, like Vegas.
Anywhere far away.
--
She shifts, moving away, and he does not follow but he watches her, those eyes staying so close, so alert, even when the corner of his mouth pulls in something like dry amusement: science and shit.
It doesn't last. Not through fevers and nosebleeds and coughing up blood and Sera locking herself in her fucking room
and that is the first flash of something really strong coming through, like he's about to cut into this story and just verbally hand Sera her own ass, but he controls it. Control is, even to a Hermetic like Hawksley, a hallmark of their Tradition. Control. Dominance. Mastery. Especially of the self. Look at what he feeds himself. Look at how he studies, how he trains his body. Hawklsey takes a sip of air instead of grabbing Sera and shaking her and asking her what the fuck. Look how he exhales, how he steadies, how the sun goes on burning no matter what madness the creatures on earth get up to.
By the time Sera gets to looking at him again, measuring him with her gaze like that, Hawksley feels an unpleasant chill along his spine from what she's described. He doesn't blame her for hating hospitals, didn't blame her for wanting to get out of that clinic even. She begins to weep. He fixes his eyes on her, and on her hand sweeping the tear from her cheek, rather than looking around the room and imagining Sera's blood all over it. Sera lying in here alone, choking on it.
The frown comes back. And it stays all through the rest of the story, only growing darker. We will be glad now that Hawksley is only a man, albeit an extraordinary one as Sera and Sid and Pan and Grace and all of them are extraordinary; we will be glad that his power has not grown to allow him flight, the control of lightning, the direction of heavenly wrath to scour the earth of those who sin in his eyes. We will be glad now of his control, and of some kernel of humanity and warmth and joy and true wonder that keeps him from being, rather than simply pretending to be, one of those smarmy douchebags.
His frown is very dark.
--
She describes the hospital room, the isolation, the fucking kidnapping, the way she looked back in time, the repeated and onging violation, the way she was dying, and he remembers at this time Sid and Dan were trying to find her and Hawksley was getting on a jet back to the States and then he was finding nothing but a wall between his magic and Sera and all the while, she was dying. Hallucinating. She describes Lena trying to reach out to her, trying to make her survive, and he doesn't know what to do with that either but he totally gets why she was pissed off even if he can't explain it either.
Not much of it makes sense to Hawksley. The woman that apologized. Sid coming up with a cure for a magical-physical disease in a matter of days. A fight that Sera doesn't remember, and a man whose skin was melting off. He doesn't question any of it, though. She has unfurled herself to tell this story, left herself raw and open with it, and he knows she is not afraid of that, he can't imagine she is afraid of that: what is Sera if not willing to be raw to the world, all its madness and all its pain in hand with all its glory and beauty and joy and sensation? Maybe he's wrong. Hawksley never leaves much room in his mind for that, though.
It's why not being able to find her pissed him off so much.
--
She's all tight against the headboard now, curled up on herself, looking small and fragile and messed up. Hawksley tips his head to the side as she says
there you were.here you are.
What exactly is he going to say to that? How does he tell her that yeah, he's here -- without it sounding false somehow, empty? Hell, what does he say to any of it? His brow is knit, his eyes only more piercing for the frown over them.
And then he is there: standing up, coming over to sit beside her against the headboard, putting his hand on her back between her shoulderblades, putting his other hand on her face. He kisses her, like she knew he would, fingers pushing into her hair, arm circling her waist. It's not very deep at first, nor forceful, but there's a firmity to it, as though the warmth he puts off were a tangible, solid thing. His hand in her hair is cupped around her jaw, guiding her to his mouth as though she would need the help, or the encouragement.
Never say that Hawksley always knows what to say, especially to something like that. He doesn't.
He knows how to do this.
SerafíneHe guides her to his mouth as if she needs the help, the encouragement even though he knows that she needs neither. He can feel that as soon as his hand spreads solidly across her spine, between her shoulderblades, the way her spine opens up into his touch. She is still crying. He can taste the salt from her tears on her lips, feel the ragged expansion of her lungs as as she lifts her mouth to his, deepening the kiss. No matter how quiet and contained and measured and fucking sober she has been these last few weeks, allowing whatever is inside her to accrete or paper over or heal - or maybe just remembering, beyond the great pleasures of life, the small ones. Doors that open and windows that close and locks she controls. Friends who love her without measure or boundary or expectation. The warmth of a fire in its hearth - no matter any of that. She is not a spark that needs to be coaxed to catch and nursed until she begins to burn. She is nothing but fire. She is always burning.
And now he's kissing her.
She knew he would. Sera did not want any more fucking words, anyway. She hates them right now and his hand is framing her jaw and his arm is circling her waist and she's shimmying her body, pulling first one leg, then the other, beneath herself, moving to her knees. The mattress sinks beneath her weight as she rises to meet him.
Sera responds to him with the coiled energy of a striking snake, opening her mouth to him, hungry, crying, neither, both, it hardly matters which. And before she reaches for him she's reaching for the hem of her t-shirt, arms crossed, pulling it up and over her head, interrupting their kiss and his contact with her with a frame of white cotton that comes and goes like the buffeting of a cumulous cloud and then she's on him again, reaching for him at last, and her hands are cool and small and firm on his jaw.
She does not want to stop kissing him.
And god she's shaking now. How she's shaking.
Somehow Sera is straddling him. His spine is pressed up against the headboard and his hands are on her hips. There is nothing gentle about her right now. She is a storm warning, the edge of an oncoming front: a centripetal swirl of god knows what. Call it everything.
Everything and nothing else.
Her fingers slip into his hair and her thumbs are on his temples and even her hands are shaking. She kisses him until she has to breathe and then she breathes until she has to kiss him again and this is how it goes for a quite remarkable period of time.
When his hand finds her breast she makes this noise and when his mouth finds her other breast she starts to cry.
Don't tell her to stop. She cannot stop crying and she does not want him to stop kissing her and he can feel every hitching breath in her spare frame, the expansion and contraction of the muscles framing her ribs.
They shed their clothes. She hardly remembers how. Maybe it is fucking magic, the world rearranging itself to follow the rules she expects of it: when she wants to touch him, she should be touching him.
There is nothing perfect here. They get remarkably tangled up in each other. She wants his hands everywhere on her body, all at once. It would be so easy to feel the wildness behind her need and hesitate. To see those tears and stop and pulls his mouth away from her breast or her shoulder or her skin. Maybe he does. Probably he does. After all, he is not the dudebro he masquerades as in ordinary life and when the person with whom you are having sex starts to cry, to openly sob, it is best to stop, to check in, to make sure that everything happening here is okay.
Everything happening here is okay. She doesn't want him to stop; she couldn't stand it if they stopped right now.
--
She does not want to part from him. She wants to cover him up. She wants him to cover her up. She wants him everywhere. By the gods, she does not want to be alone.
The first time she comes, he is still mostly-clothed. She is on her back now, his hand is between her thighs and his body all solid heat over/against her framing the sensation of each little shock as he brings her closer and closer and closer to the edge. Her hand is cupping his skull, holding him close. They are brow to brow, nose to nose, mouth to mouth and the only air she wants to breathe is that which he has expelled from his lungs. She is lightheaded and her sternum aches; feels like the bone has been cracked into slivers and she's bleeding this impossible light from the opening wound. Everything tattering apart, going strange and dark and bright, electric and astonishing and immediate. She remembers this.
Oh, she remembers this.
He reminds her, again and again and again.
--
Later - much later - Sera falls asleep with her head against his chest and her arms wrapped around his torso. Her cheek against his ribs, her ear close enough that she can hear the strong beat of his chambered heart. Her head rises and falls with every breath he takes. She is spent; so utterly spent that for the first time in some weeks, sleep comes for her without reservation.
