My Brother's Bar

Serafíne

The invitation was without warning or presentiment, and really quite simple.

Drinks tonight?

- from Sera's number. Her old number, which is her new number. The same number: a brand new phone.

Lena Reilly

Like Serafine, Lena has a new phone with the old phone number. The deejay has still not been around mages enough since the Hydra incident to get Ginger installed on the new one, but she still has her contacts, thanks to the Cloud. (And they say technology is evil.)

It takes her a short while to respond. Around twenty minutes pass by before the response comes, emblazoning its notification across Sera's screen:

I'm free 4 that. Name the time & place & I'll B there.

Serafíne

8:45

2376 15th St

----

My Brother's Bar is busy for a Wednesday night in January, but the dinner rush is dying down by the time Lena arrives. There's no sign on the door naming the place, but everyone close by knows what it is: the oldest continuously operating bar in Denver. The place where the beat poets hung out. A great place to crowd in for a Pabst Blue Ribbon of a Friday night and gorge on good old fashioned bar-food. Giant burgers slathered with mayo and local cheddar, surrounded by piles of onion rings, golden as a crown. And if you ever have a craving for Samoas or Thin Mints, well, they sell Girl Scout Cookies year round.

There's always classical music playing in the background. Tonight, as Lena walks in, the swelling strains of Ralph Vaughn Williams' Variations on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

The pleasant hum of people drinking and chatting and eating and drinking more creates a bright and rather golden sort of halo about the place, though there are a fair number of empty tables, and even as Lena walks in, another couple or two are peeling themselves away from the bar. Wednesday isn't exactly prime party time, and most people have to work to pay for their burgers and beer.

Not Sera, who has been awake for what - three hours, perhaps four, five at the outside now - and who is seated in a rather isolated booth at the back of the rather small establishment. For all her need to take up as much space as possible, Serafíne is actually rather small, curled up in a booth, without heels to augment her height, she would be easy to miss if she were not so hard to overlook. The hair and the vibe and the Vibe and the look, and the consor Dan - who is tall, long legs sprawled into the aisle, forearms covered in tattooes visible beneath the rolled up sleeves of his button-down flannel shirt.

They are sitting together, talking. Drinks in front of them, and Dan has an arm slung loosely over Sera's shoulders, but if and when Sera senses Lena's presence in their immediate vicinity, she nudges Dan, who raises an arm to signal her over. He's already getting to his feet, rising to his full height, reaching for his drink as Lena arrives. "Can I get you a drink?" Dan's asking her, even as he's clearly moving to give the pair of them privacy.

Sera's dark eyes are on Lena the whole time, watchful, perhaps even thoughtful, but not edged.

She looks well, Sera. Healthy. Skinny yeah - but she has always been skinny. Harrow and bone and whip and cording - but remarkably well. The long coils of dyed-blond hair that spill over her shoulders, the dark shadow of her side cut, the dark smear of eyemakup emphasizing her rather intense, arresting gaze, all of it. She gives Lena a quirked, somewhat lopsided grin by way of greeting but is otherwise quiet while Dan takes Lena's order - for drink and food, if she wants any - before wandering off to the bar to enter them both.

Lena Reilly

She has the time and place, and she shows up right on schedule. Lena is as fre a spirit as anyone else in their tradition, but she's always been mindful of the fact that freedom means being personally responsible and that includes not keeping people waiting. She's there a couple of minutes beforehead, pulling up on her green Kawasaki Ninja outside of the place and parking it. The helmet is locked into place on the bike and runs a hand through her hair to tame it as she walks to the door.

Sera and Lena haven't seen each other since that brief conversation at Luke's office. Sera had her struggles to deal with, and Lena hers. Perhaps they've both found some equilibrium in that time, because there has been recovery all around. Lena has managed to regain a little of the weight she lost during that harrowing experience and the days and weeks after, though it may not be as easy to tell underneath her jacket. The jacket isn't a leather biking jacket, but rather a windbreaker. The kind of thing that doesn't weigh you down, but still offers some protection from the elements. She's wearing a burgundy turtleneck underneath and a pair of jeans, the soles of her boots tapping on the floor as she walks inside the place and looks around.

It's a nice atmosphere, this bar, and it's warm without being overly cutesy. Lena has been here once or twice, mostly when she's come along with people from one of the clubs she deejays. So while she isn't a regular or anything like that, she doesn't have the stop-and-ogle habit that first-timers might get in such a place. Instead her attention is directed around the place, scanning for Sera. When she zeroes in on the mage and her consor, Lena gives a faint smile and raises her hand toward them, approaching.

Lena has recovered somewhat, but she's certainly not the same. She's always been somewhat reserved, particularly for their tradition. She was just starting to open up before Hydra, and now she has regressed, perhaps notably. She's fighting her way back and she isn't skittish now, but there's a ceiling to the level of warmth as she comes up.

"Hey, guys." Dan asks what she wants, and she looks his way. "Oh, uh...Monsters Ball. Thanks." The smile she gives him is sincere in its gratitude, and she moves to sit down with her attention turned to Sera.

"Hey. It's good to see you."

Serafíne

"Got it - " Dan replies to Lena's order. He's holding his tall pilsner glass by the lip at just that moment, but shifts his grip to the shaft as he glances at Sera, assesses the level of her drink - something honeycolored and aromatic in an oversized snifter glass, which catches the light and and shines through, all dark amber - and decides to get her another without needed to ask. Briefly, Sera's gaze flickers from Lena to Dan, just when she feels the weight of his regard on her glass. The quick curve of her mouth is full of quiet, unspoken irony and the faintest sort of rally challenge felt in the upward lilt of her usually flat brows, which all settles back into something simpler, kinder, when her gaze returns to Lena's countenance.

Lena says that it is good to see them. Sera lifts that snifter in something like a toast, her fingertips delicate on the bellied out body of the glass, her arm slung all casually on the edge of the scarred wooden table.

"You too." Tips the glass in Lena's direction, then sets it down again without taking a drink. "Haven't really seen you around lately. Or heard tell of you at the country place. Thought I'd check in."

Enough smearing light in Sera's gaze to suggest that this is not her first drink of the evening, but too much loose, elegant, physical control over her movement to suggest that this is the seventeenth. So she's somewhere between sober and golden, which is a very fine place to be.

Lena Reilly

In truth, Lena isn't much of a drinker. She isn't a teetotaler by any stretch of the imagination and she is no stranger to the use of recreational substances--both for recreation and otherwise--but she's always been about moderation. That moderation has slipped slightly in the last couple of months though. Just enough so that she wouldn't be accused of being a lightweight. And whether it had slipped or not, she's not the kind of person who looks askance at someone else's habits. Let each Seer account his own deeds, as they say...and while that particular part of the Code is more about shunning those who are dangerous, any rule also proves its inverse true. Sera makes her own choices, and Lena trusts her to be able to do so.

She looks after Dan a moment, then looks back when the other Ecstatic tilts her glass in pseudo-salute. Sera says she hasn't seen nor heard of Lena, and that makes the deejay dip her head briefly in a nod. "Yeah." She gives a light shrug, leaning back in her seat. She isn't quite meeting Sera's gaze, but she's not actively avoiding it either. "I needed some time, you know? Need some time still, maybe." A brief intake and exhale of breath in a not-quite-but-almost sigh. It's not quite melancholy, more...uncertain. Fidgety, perhaps.

"So you've been back there? Or..." She pauses then, switches her avenue of conversation. "How are you doing?"

Serafíne

For the first time, Sera's eyes drop from Lena to the drink she has in hand. She watches the light spike through the alcohol. The strange architecture of refraction evident therein. The sheen of superficial volatile oils on the surface, the subtle imprints the pads of her fingers have left on the glass. There are so many things one might expect her to say in response to that; there are rhythms to these interactions - survivors coming together after a spectacular crash, some shared horror. Lifeaffirming mouthfuls which, whatever the hell they mean, have ritual, have substance, have the imprint of exchange on them.

"What are you doing with all that time you're taking," says Sera, who took, has taken, is taking more than enough of her own time, after all, " - that you need fucking more of it?"

It is a question, nothing more. Softened by the quiet shape of her rather crawling mouth, and the almost bruising intimacy of her singular attention.

Lena Reilly

The question is softened, but it still causes Lena's attention to snap sharply to the other Ecstatic. The instinct kicks in and there is a momentary hardness in her eyes, purely instinctual. Passion threatening to rise up to her defense. A half a moment of rationality lets her push it aside and not go on the assault. She didn't mean it as an aspersion, she says to herself. Not a reproach, or an attack. She's just worried. Maybe.

"Besides rebuilding my professional reputation after missing one of the bigger work weeks of the year and figuring out a new place to live?" She shrugs again, reaching up to swipe an errant slip of hair from tickling the side of her nose. "Trying to refind myself. Trying to go back through a process I went through several years ago and gain a sense of internal balance. I can handle the fact that this has raised a ton of old trust issues for me, Sera. Deep ones, but I'll get through them."

A frown follows. "What I can't handle is pity. I've seen that look a lot before, and I hate it. And there are...some of us out there, who every time I've see them since, give me this look that just makes me want to rip it off their face. So rather than do that, its healthier for me to try and work through it away from people who might give me said looks."

Serafíne

Sera's leaning forward, then. This snaking movement of her spine, her elbow on the table, chin resting in the curve of her palm. Her shoulders - framed in the familiar uniform, really, of a dark leather jacket slung over some skimpy top that would show off more skin that it conceals, if she just took off the jacket - a bit elevated but otherwise her body language is liquid and casual and settled - present, entirely, in her skin. She lives no where else.

She listens with this breathing equanimity that nevertheless seems painfully open. Naked, exposed. Dark eyes skew away from Lena only briefly, to track Dan's return across the bar. He sets down Lena's drink - the Monster's Ball - in front of her, careful not to spill a drop, then gifts Sera with another Redstone, leaning in briefly to kiss her on the crown of her head. "I ordered your burger, too," he murmurs into her hair, already pulling back from her and heading back toward the bar, where his half-consumed pilsner was left behind. The crowd noise seems to accompany him, advances with his approach, recedes as he beats his retreat.

--

Sera's gaze slides back to Lena then. She makes a quiet noise in the back of her throat, like a considering, thoughtful click. Breathes in through her nostrils, as if she were tasting the history of the place in the air. Breathes out again, too, long and deep and quiet.

"Who's giving you those looks?"

Lena Reilly

The moment of intensity that rose up in Lena when she answered Serafine...it's broken when Dan comes up. The metaphorical spell wafts away and she looks back to the consor to give him a small, appreciative smile. "Thanks," she offers, leaning back then to watch the brief exchange between the two. There's a little tilt of her head, a quiet reflection in the closeness and understanding between Dan and Sera. It could be interpreted as envy, but it's not. It's remniscent and even a bit melancholy, but you could only detect the latter the way you might see the ocean through a dirty, smudged window at a beach house you rented during a rainy and windy September. In all, it's more just observant than anything else.

Sera asks who has been looking at Lena like that, and the other Ecstatic shakes her head. "It doesn't matter. I'm not trying to talk shit about anyone, and I'm not angry with them right now. I get it. I don't like it, but I understand. I've been dealing with people giving me those looks as long as I've been Awake...it's why I didn't say anything about my condition until I literally had no choice. It's just...a raw nerve right now. I think you can get that."

She pauses then, picks up her drink. Rum, Monster energy drink and Dr. Pepper all in one cocktail. She's a caffeine junkie through and through. "I notice you didn't answer how you're doing, by the way."

Serafíne

Sera breathes out, brief and hard. This soundless huff of laughter that is not precisely an expression of humor but something else, strange and nameless and oddly effervescent. Call it: rising.

And she lifts her chin from its cradle in the palm of her hand, carelessly, casually shaking her golden head in clear negation of something in the interior of Lena's response to her. Picks up her own drink, and sips, and then drinks, and then drinks the sliding summer sweetness of her Redstone, licks the sugar from her lips, and turns her head slightly to the side. A long glance down, half-shaded by her darkly made-up lashes, chin hovering over the collar of her leather coat as if she were asking the key of light reflected in the polished wood of the bench seat what her next line is.

"I wasn't asking to try to get you to talk shit about anybody," her eyes back on Lena's, steady and solid and sure and almost sober except that Sera is never Sera, not entirely, when she is sober. So this: a different sort of sobriety. "I was asking because I've never seen anyone look at you like that.

"So I was wondering: whom?

"And I wonder if that pity you're seeing is really lingering there, lurking beneath the surface, or just your own reflection looking back at you. So ready to see what you think you're going to see that it's just there.

"So," a little shrug, another sip of mead, as Sera winds herself back down. Presses her mouth quietly together. " - why don't you tell me, whom?"

For the moment, Lena's direct question to Sera goes unanswered.

Lena Reilly

Now it's Lena's time for an eyebrow to increase its slope, changing from a gentle rolling hill to a sharper, more jagged mountain. She takes a swallow off of her drink and sets it down, watching the other woman closely now. There are a lot of ways that she could answer the question--angry, defensive, deflecting, apologetic. She could lash out at Sera and deliver an emotional low blow or she could up and leave. And it's distinctly possible that all of these thoughts occur to her.

But instead, she goes a different route. She aims for frank. "Sera...I don't mean to sound like a bitch here, and I'm not saying to imply you've done anything wrong. But you've only seen people look at me at all a handful of time at best. Would you really know if someone was?"

She stops herself then, purses her lips and looks at the other woman. "I don't pity myself. I haven't in a long time. Am I depressed? Yes, deeply. I don't think that's a big shocker. Do I have a lot of issues with trust? More than I can quantify. Am I wallowing in what happened to us? Maybe a bit, at times. But I'm not projecting that onto how anyone else sees me. When I look at Grace, for example, and she can't look my way without looking like she's about to burst into tears on my behalf, that's not in my head. That's real."

She's talking herself into a higher pitch, increased volume. She doesn't work herself into a frenzy or a rage; she isn't even vaguely frantic. It's just an increase of intensity, a rise of emotion. She catches herself and lets it go.

"So yeah. There's one. And it's not her issue. I get why she does it. She went through a lot, and I went through a lot. We all did. I don't dislike her. So it would be best if I didn't snap at her or try to hit her with something in a sudden burst of Stop Looking At Me Like That."

She leans forward a little. "Now, your turn."

Serafíne

Lena aims for frank. Serafíne does not aim for anything. She does not know that there may be a target, with rings and a center through which one is meant to spear an arrow. She would not recognize it if it were painted precisely in front of her, the points value listed inside each ring.

This stillness settled like a mantle over her, and the surety of her attention lingers precisely and wholly on Lena as the other woman perhaps cycles through all the many possibles iterations of responses, and finds one in the center of her tongue. Sera's eyes, dark, reflect the lights of the bar. Vaughn Williams' seascapes glissande lush and glorious in the background while the warm murmur of strangers' conversations burnishes the air.

A flicker in Sera's eyes then, as Lena speaks, which is neither responsive anger nor reluctant guilt. Sera glances away then. There is no concession in this, just a strange, breathing distance that seems to be defined by the downward slant of her eyes, the angle of her golden head. The way she almost half-smiles, the expression creasing the lines around her eyes without ever reaching her mouth seems both ineffable, immanent and remarkably sad.

No longer watching Lena, Sera just listens now, the sharp definition of her profile softened by the curve of her cheek. Her tongue at the roof of her mouth, as if she were sampling the words she chooses before she shares them.

Except she isn't.

She's just tasting them. She's just figuring out how they feel.

--

Lena leans forward and declares it Sera's turn.

"I don't take turns." A little shrug, easy and thoughtless and sure. Maybe a little insouciant, but not needling. She's nearly smiling around the words, and glances up then, finds Lena's gaze - if Lena will give it - with an unerring directness.

"Grace doesn't pity you."

"Maybe she has tears in her eyes because she doesn't sleep through the night. Because she wakes up with screaming nightmares about what happened. Maybe the pollen was high. Maybe she has a right to be sad. But she doesn't pity you, and I don't think she ever has.

"I know Grace pretty well, and I know that.

"If you can't handle her - or anyone else, for that fucking matter - right now, I think that's cool. Sometimes you have to redraw your circles, write new boundaries into your skin. Sometimes it's time to give them up. But Grace doesn't pity you. And if you see that in her, you're wrong. You're judging her, and you're judging her wrongly. And if you see that in her, you see it because you expect to see it. You're writing your own expectation - your own fucking fears - into someone else's eyes.

"Which, you know. Is okay too. But might be, in the long run, a shitty thing to do to yourself."

Lena Reilly

"You don't know anything about any of this." That's the simple words, put out through clenched teeth. The restraint has faded away, the frankness turned into hardness. "Sera, you don't know me. You have not been in my presence when Grace has been around me, and you don't know what she's done or said. Or anyone else, because this isn't about Grace."

She stands up then, fishing into her jacket for some money for the drink with a faint, bitter smirk. "I actually thought for half a minute that you wanted to come out just to hang out and maybe be a friend. I hoped that you weren't going to sit me down and give me a lecture, quote-unquote, for my own good. But I suppose that was too much to hope for."

The money is dropped on the table and she looks at Sera. "One more time, so we're not misunderstanding...you don't know me. And don't ever try to tell me what I'm thinking. You don't know, because you've never cared enough to ask. Just about nobody in this fucking city has. And maybe that's a little my fault because I act guarded, but mostly its because nobody really gives a shit. So thanks for reminding me why its a bad idea to go back to the chantry. Saves me getting a whole bunch more lectures about what I'm doing wrong and what I should be doing differently."

And with that, she makes move to leave.

Serafíne

There is a quiet vulnerability that underlines Sera's expression. It is almost always there, a certain knot between her straight blonde brows, a certain openness to the curve of her mouth. Something about the way she refuses easy feints and the comfort of clichés. Though it may be difficult to see when one is not looking for her.

She is giving this narrow little shrug when Lena tells her that she doesn't know anything about any of this, the sort that looks like surrender and feels a little bit like but I know a secret, but the shadow of that expression is already starting to crumble into something wholly different, even before Lena stands up, fishing for money to pay for the drink already purchased, half-finished, smirking, bitter.

Mouth half-open, eyes widening with a raw, lancing startlement, she draws in a brief, sharp breath. The whole moment feels sheared open, torn and twisted and strange and terrible and surreal. Why does it make her think of broken guardrails on the side of a mountain road - and she's breathing in and the breath does not come, not fully, because there is a strange seizure behind her breast and something painful and sharp in the back of her throat.

The money falls from hand-to-table. The movement pulls Sera's eyes from Lena's down to the table, the moisture from their glasses on the warm, polished, well-scarred wood. The pale reflection of Lena's face a smear in the varnish, her windbreaker a swallowing shadow all around. Sera doesn't look back up. She just stares at the money as Lena goes on, and on, and on.

And then: turns to go.

--

Sera says nothing. It's all she can do to bear all that pain and bitterness and breathe. Her eyes are damp, reflective in the supple light of the half-full bar, all that wood and polished brass. All those bottles. The low circles of ambient light. Lena is not likely to notice the first, quiet shudder of Sera's shoulders, muted by the weight of her leather jacket.

And by the time Sera starts to cry, Lena has already turned to leave. Sera seams her mouth and turns her head sharply aslant, her shoulders stiff with resolve - which hardly matters. The tears fall, whether she will or no.

Lena Reilly

[[Per+Awarepathy: Do I notice this? Spec: Uncanny Instincts]]

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

Serafíne

Jess wants me to witness this whatever this is!

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

Lena Reilly

She meant to walk out. She needs to walk out. Let me be clear: there is a physical need for Lena to leave this place right now. Pins are pricking at the backs of her arms, the base of her skull. The woman who actively avoids physical contact and who keeps herself guarded from the very people she'd throw herself in front of a bus for has had too much striking at her in this moment, and there is (possibly imagined, possibly not) a dull pounding beginning in the back of her head and directly in front of her ears.

She's already turned to go. And yet, she forces herself to stop. Because she saw that expression on the other woman's face, she knows what it means. Well, she thinks she does. She's smart enough to know that she has hurt Serafine. And there's a moment where she closes her eyes, sets her jaw. God dammit, she thinks. But Sera's in pain, and so she can endure the discomfort for a little longer.

"I'm sorry." She's saying it as she turns around, already walking to the edge of the table perpendicular to Sera. She doesn't move in close, put her hand on Sera's arm or anything like that. Lena has an awkwardness around her that comes with wanting to grab someone until all the pain goes away, and being afraid to touch them. The push-pull-push of her own issues. So instead of coming in close, she drops into a crouch next to the table. "I'm sorry, hon. That wasn't fair of me. That wasn't about you, I promise. You shouldn't have gotten that thrown at you."

The words ring sincere, even if they might not have come before she had departed otherwise.

Serafíne

Sera's in pain. Sera opens herself up to pain few people open themselves up to anything. She just allows it to happen to her, without thought or consequence. So she's crying; and openly by the time Lena grits her teeth and returns to the table, her throat tight and her shoulders braces against the hiccoughing contractions of her diaphragm. The tears stain her cheeks, but they do not really smudge her dark make-up. Her nose is red, though, and starting to run. Sera sniffs, sharply to clear her sinuses and holds herself so that she is looking distinctively away from the crowd and Lena's exit route and/or her return path. So that she's looking at the wall, the wood paneling, the shin of incandescent lighting in the varnish.

Crouched perpindicular to the bench seat, Lena can see the way Sera has curled her legs up beneath her body, the heels she kicked off at some point in the evening tumbled between the legs of the table.

Sera reaches up to scrub some of her tears off her cheeks with the heel of her hands, and shrugs her rather narrow shoulders in a curling, dismissive gesture.

"I know," a flickering glance toward Lena and another distinctive sniff. "It's cool. though I'm fine." This sad, scintillating, sympathetic little smile. "It's cool. You should go."

Lena Reilly

She sighs, rubs at her temple. And she looks back to Sera with a little nod, still apologetic. "We should try this again sometime, okay? Maybe fix that not knowing each other thing."

She reaches out, but doesn't quite make the distance to touch the woman. "Tell Dan thanks. I'll see you later."

And then she's turning to leave. Walking out a little quicker than she might intend.

sunny side up

It is bright and it is morning. It is something like morning, by which we mean: there is sunlight. There is sunlight streaming in through the windows from some direction or other, as sunlight is wont to do. What Sera calls morning most of the western world calls mid-afternoon, and the day is so startlingly, spectacularly warm for mid-January that everyone keeps leaving the doors and windows open.

Everyone, at the moment, meaning: Serafíne.
She is the only one in the room.

Sera sits barefooted and crosslegged on the table in the midst of the bright white kitchen. There are pastries left over from the morning rush. The morning rush when whoever crashed somewhere in the house the night before woke to early coffee and tousle-headed, zombified housemates rushing off to the service-jobs for which their liberal arts degrees have qualified them. The pastries are on a plate and the plate is white and porcelain and ringed with two thin bands, one silver and one gold. There are crumbs, left behind. Someone - probably Dee - though to cover it with plastic wrap.

For later.
For her.

Sera is not eating the pastries. Dan promised her eggs. When did he promise her eggs? It was yesterday or tomorrow, and either one feels just fine with her. She is a little bit hung over and her tongue feels thick and that's fine too. She can feel it all the way down her throat, connected to some rootless core in the center of her body, which she thinks of like a molten sun or -

or -

Oh, it feels nice to breathe. The circulation of blood through her lungs is a particular and pungent mystery and sometimes the contemplation thereof arrests her. There is the spark and there is the ash and there is the salt on her tongue.

It is not as bitter as you may imagine.

And here is the figure of a woman at the edge of the room.

--

"Hey you're up. I didn't hear you." When Dan comes in, he walks right through her. "How do you want your eggs?" Of course he walks right through her.

"I wanna go to the park, today." She's everything. She's everywhere. "And my eggs - make them sunny side up."

glad you came

Serafíne

Christmas and New Year's always turn themselves right back around and into January. It is some sort of terrible alchemy - all the aftermath of all that celebration. The days grow brighter at both ends but winter settles in, unrelenting. People stop drinking so much, start working out more. Resolve themselves that they will try to pay off their credit cards, and the stores are bare, or just filled with the leftovers that no one purchased in the first place, and the restaurants are less busy, and the bars are rather more quiet, and on and on.

Most of the homeowners up and down Corona Street have taken down their Christmas decorations. Not 719. The blonde-brick three story house is still wrapped in many colored lights. The trees, the shrubbery, the porchposts and the railing. The upstairs windows and on and on.

There is a fresh-cut tree discarded in the yard awaiting recycling, so some of the interior decorations must be down.

Even from a block or two or three away, it feels like Sera. She is sunk into the bones of the place.

Grace

Grace got a call a few days ago, and since then, has not been back to the Chantry except to sleep. Let us say, she has been having fun, in Grace's definition of the term (which is a lot more solitary, a lot more focused and requires less chemicals than Sera's definition). But eventually, even playing with her new servers gets old.

Wait a minute, no, it does not get old. It will never get old. But her servers are busy with a long process that will take a few hours, and Grace decided that watching them do their thing was about as exciting as watching grass grow, and sent Sera a text.

'Wanna hang out?'

It's probable. I mean, we are talking about Sera. It would take something fairly serious to make Sera not want to hang out. There's more to it than Grace put in the text, but that'll have to wait.

Serafíne

What Grace receives back from Sera is a very clear and very simple and very concise,

sure. come over?

a few seconds or minutes or hours after she sends the inquiry. And not long after that first text, a second,

my place i mean.

Just in case, you know. When Sera gets started texting, watch out world.

Grace

[Oh yeah, I forget. Nightmares?]

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (4, 5, 6, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace

[Also, Awareness!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace

It's not hard to feel that sense of Sera as she drives up to the house, bringing her own abrupt shift with her. She parks, and gets out of her old Toyota wearing a grey turtleneck jacket and jeans and tennis shoes, her very own uniform. Seems like she always has this same getup anymore, now that winter's struck. Sometimes there's a heavier coat on top of that, but it doesn't seem to change.

And of course, she's wearing her laptop bag. Can't go without that for more than a few minutes.

She also knocks at the door, and maybe she doesn't have to exactly, but still.

Serafíne

Awareness!

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne

No one really knocks at the door. Or rather, the variegated parade of people who feel like they belong here or want to belong here or need to belong here or dream about belonging here do not knock. Some others do.

People like Grace who wear the same thing every day and carry laptop bags and dream about the pleasures of exploring their brand new servers.

No one's really listening for the door but of course someone answers it. Eventually. It may be that our Sera sensed Grace at some remove and when that sense of Grace's movement-through-space became static rather than dynamic, nudged one of her housemates to answer the door.

So, yes. The door opens. Dee answers, dressed in her derby gear, a duffel bag and a pair of roller-skates slung across either shoulder. The quick flash of a perfectly crimson smile, "Grace, hey. I was just on my way out. Sera's upstairs, pretending like she's not smoking in the house. You know where her room is, right?"

And if Grace does not know where Sera's room is, well. Dee tells her. Up the stairs, the second door on the right. Can't miss it.

Grace

"Hi Dee! I must say. Ninjabread. Awesome," Grace says, and gives her a thumbs up and a smile. She's better at this, the one-on-one, than than the one-on-fifty like at the Christmas party. It's highly likely that Dee was there and got totally ignored by Grace in her way of dealing with crowds (which is to try very hard to imagine that there aren't actually people there).

In any case, she nods a farewell to the roller-derbyist and heads inside, up the stairs, and when she gets to Sera's room (note, she did not know where Sera's room was, this is a first) she knocks. Again.

And again, she probably doesn't have to.

Serafíne

Grace did not even make it up the stairs before. So now she climbs past the black and white photographs of Amelia Earhart and the spider plant in its macrame holder onto the upstairs landing, and knocks on a particular door. There is a sweet, somewhat skunky odor evident when Grace gets there, though the smokiness is not deep and beneath it the sharp bite of winter air from an open window. Music a low and background rumble, which does not stop when there is a brief and quiet scramble from someone inside, who gets up to answer.

Once again, Sera sends someone else to open the door. This time it is Dan, who towers over Grace. The scent of pot is wrapped all around his skin and his eyes are bloodshot and there's a keen sort of languor to him as he steps back to let Grace in. All,

"Grace, hey. You didn't have to knock."

Though given that this is Sera and this is Sera's bedroom and one never knows whom she might be entertaining, or how,

" - but it was probably wise." This quick, bemused grin. "I'm gonna run downstairs for a sec. You want something to drink?"

Sera is just evident behind him, sitting on the arm of a huge old armchair parked beneath a bank of windows framing the winter garden. One of the windows is open at least a quarter of the way, and Sera is exhaling a lungful of smoke into the bright cold air. Otherwise, Grace just has a moment to take in the surroundings - the chaos of them. Art and clothes and clothes and art and jewelry and many, many stranger things are scattered everywhere. Some on the wall, others on the floor. There is a covered with stuff and a huge, unmade bed in the middle of the room. A mismatched group of thrift-shop finds and antiques, all of it thoroughly Sera.

Grace

"Oh hey, Dan," she starts, but her eyes skip around the room, from thing to thing to thing. "No, I'm fine, really. But um... You have Sera's phone perchance?"

'Cause, Dan is the keeper of technological things. So, he might be the one to ask.

And Sera's old phone, the one with Ginger, is dead and gone.

Whatever his response, she finds Sera in all that stuff (not hard, Sera is unmistakable, unmissed) and quirks up a little smile. "Hey Sera."

Serafíne

"I want the Jacobite," Sera calls after Dan, as he's greeting Grace and Grace refuses the offer of drink and Dan's greeting Grace but is also trying to remember whether or not he has Sera's phone, and is starting to reply that he thinks Sera has it,

except, Sera answers for herself. Giving Grace a lazy wave from where she perches on the arm of that big armchair, breathing out one last lungful of smoke all wrapped up in a green chenille blanket as ward against the necessary cold. Covering the bowl of her bong with the body of a Zippo lighter to deny the remaining embers oxygen and until the spark inside dies.

"I have my phone. Graaaaaaace."

She might be stoned, Sera. She holds up the device for approval and/or inspection.

"See? Come sit."

There are three places to sit in the room, other than the floor. The bed. The armchair, of which Sera is presently taking up about a quarter, all of that on the arm, and the bench for the vanity, which is quite close to the door and all the way across the room from Sera's perch.

Grace

Sera might be stoned, like the sun might be hot, or the ocean might be wet, Grace decides. It's probably the way Sera says her name. Anyway, she gives a grin and plops her laptop bag down on the bed, followed by her self. She sits on the side of the bed closest to that window, mind you, so she's not too far away. Somewhere in the middle.

"I thought maybe you'd like to chat up Ginger again sometime, you know? Also just thought I'd stop by. Say hi. So, hi."

Serafíne

The bed as mentioned is huge and - a King or perhaps even a California King or maybe an Emperor - unmade. White or perhaps ivory sheets with an obscenely high thread-count that feels like silk, and a fluffy white/ivory duvet and loose top sheets more or less twisted into the sort of fluffed up nest that hamsters or other small, adorable rodents might make to burrow themselves into. Grace sits on the side closest to the window and while she picks her way through the chaos of shoes and spangly bras and teeny t-shirts and leather jackets and carved wooden frogs and folk-art sculptures and mixed media collages and flyers for this show or that opening, the embers in the bowl are finally extinguished. Sera sets the no-longer-smoking bong aside in the windowsill and puts down her phone on the seat of the armchair long enough to reach over and mostly-shut that half-open window. The garden beyond: stark and spare. Bare limbs and an interrupted view of the downtown skyline, there, between that apartment building and that home behind them.

"I've been doing pretty well without Ginger, lately." Sera tells Grace, then. Confesses, really. She's still holding herself, and holding herself a little bit apart, even as all the other pieces of her life are slowly fitting themsleves together. The edge of a moderately ironic half-smile as her dark eyes drop from Grace to the phone, then lift again. "But I suppose I could find a way to do just as well with her.

"Hi Grace. How are you?"

Grace

Grace bites her lower lip and smiles at the question. "Kalen... do you know Kalen? Anyway, he bought us a computer lab. Just like, up and bought all this equipment, like its a Christmas present or something."

She sits up stock-straight, but wobbly, and all grins. "And he says he wants to learn the language of computers. I have a wee little nerd on my hands, to bring up as my very own!"

"Hey, you get that from Connor?" she nods toward the bong. "He had some great free samples at the Chantry."

Serafíne

"Hermetic, right?" The briefest pause for confirmation of the information, before Sera gives Grace a little curl of her shoulders. "I met him. We got high together. Talked about the way people used to navigate the sea, with just stars."Learning the language of computers sounds boring-as-fuck," she continues, Sera, all wry, her eyes dark and affixed on Grace, taking in the smile and then the grin, the excitement evident on her face and in her voice. " - but I'm glad you're happy.

"Don't know Connor. I don't think we've met. As for this, I've got sources." Then a pause, and perhaps a double-take.

"Wait. You said great free samples. Grace did you get stoned?"

Grace

Grace's eyes glitter with fake-menace as Sera insults her very being as 'boring-as-fuck'. Two can play this game. "Well, I find parties boring as fuck, so there.

"But it was nice to see you happy at Christmas."

"Oh, that's a shame. You should really meet him. He's new, like really new. And he sells pot," she says. Sera and Connor would get along like peas and carrots, one would think. But then, Sera and Grace get along, and you wouldn't think the same of them.

"And... yeah? I had some of his free samples," she says, and scans the ceiling's borders. It's less cluttered up there. "Helps me relax. And eat. And you know... relax."

Serafíne

"I had a good night that night," Sera tells Grace, with a quiet sort of smile that lingers in the gleaming intention of her eyes and settles a quiet, steady curve on her quick-moving mouth. Which is true, absolutely and objectively true. " - but I'm still not," a brief, apparent pause. "I don't always have the energy for strangers, right now. I think I still mostly need it for me. It's hard to say why. That's just how it feels."

There is a particular inflection to the word strangers, there. Easy enough to read it as strangers, period, though in truth Sera means it much more specifically: strangers, who know magic.

"Maybe you'd like parties more if you go stoned first. I'm taking it that was an endorsement of the product, yeah?" The vaguest sort of grin. Then, a gesture toward the now-exinguished bong. "You want to try some of this?"

Grace

Sera says she doesn't have the energy for strangers, but if that were true, why the party? Why did she look so beatific surrounded by strangers? It puts a quizzical expression on Grace's face as she tries to puzzle this one out. But then Sera makes with a bit of innuendo. "Yes, Sera, the product, not Connor," she sniffs, and coughs. "I think he's more interested in Shoshannah anyway. Or she is with him. Or whatever."

But then, like it usually happens (when pot dealers aren't leaving notes behind saying 'please, take some of my stuff!' that is) a friend offers her a hit. Sera might have been surprised at Grace getting high, and truthfully it's not a common thing. Mostly that's just because Grace doesn't like the idea of spending all that money on something as 'unnecessary' as weed. But when offered...

"Sure, I'll bite."

Serafíne

Grace is going to bite. And Sera, who does not have the energy for stranges - and she means, implicitly though Grace does not understand that she means this implicitly - awakened strangers, magic and all its many consequences. All the expectations and disasters, all the - whatever it is that strangers bring with them.

All the need.All the love.

All the light.

She has no room for them in her heart now; just her own strangers, fallible, lovely humanity, crowding itself into her home again and again and again.

And she wasn't even meaning to make with the innuendo but Grace hears it and gives Sera a brief glimpse into the love life of Connor the stranger and Shoshannah and Sera gives her a wry, rather indulgent little grin, then picks up the bong and the lighter and nudges open the window a bit more and carries the former over to Grace.

Sera is wearing boxers and a t-shirt which is her I am lounging at home for a while attire and she parks herself beside Grace, offering her both the bong and the lighter. "I don't usually smoke inside but it's too fucking cold. You ever use a bong before? Breathe in through the opening while you hold the lighter lit over the bowl, see."

Grace

Ok, so Grace has yet to use a bong. Most of her partaking has been in the form of a shared joint, but she likes the idea. It's economical, they say.

So, she gets handed the proper equipment, gets instruction, and sets to it -- holding bong in one hand, lighter heating up the bowl's contents in the other. It catches, and then a breath held deep. There's always a bit of a challenge to keep from coughing at this point, but she takes it, blowing the spent air out the window as much she can from her Sera's-bed perch.

And then, she coughs. Destroying that whole 'yeah, I'm so cool' moment.

Serafíne

Sera, who has tucked herself quite neatly beside Grace in these moments, is absolutely ready. Ready to take the bong from Grace's hand and take her own easy hit, rather smoother than Grace's but no one is watching them and Sera is not measuring cool points. She's just breathing in the smoke from that long ceramic column and holding it in not desperately but savoringly, as if she were a dirigible just loosened from its mooring, already starting to drift into the sky. Her exhale is a deep and abiding sigh that opens up her body through the vertebrae of her spine, and she's ready to hand the bong back to Grace when Grace starts coughing.

So, instead, Sera leans forward and half rises to set the device on the windowsill where the embers can continue to burn without consequence for the many things scattered on the floor, and reaches over to rub Grace thoughtfully between the shoulderblades as she coughs out those lungsful of smoke, so deeply held that perhaps tears from the force of the coughing fit.

"If you want I could see if there are any leftovers of Dee's brownies, instead."

Grace

Grace flaps her hands at Sera like she's waving her off, "Oh, I'm fine. It's just the first hit, you know... always a bit hard for me."

Oh, to be smooth! To not be so red-in-the-face! She disguises it with a quirked-up smile, and the tiniest of thin coughs. Well, it's a good thing that pleasantness is starting to kick in, yeah? It relaxes the social anxiety right out of one...

"Oh you're kidding me. She makes those kind of brownies too? You won the roommate lottery, Sera."

Serafíne

So it's just the first hit, and that's always hard on Grace, and Sera hardly notices the red-in-the-face or the social anxiety or the awkwardness or the longing for something other-than-awkwardness or any of the rest of it. Or perhaps Sera does notice it; she cannot help but notice it, she breathes such things in the way strangers at the beach take in that first lungful of salt-sea air, with a present sort of mindfulness, an awareness of the strangeness and beauty in everything they inhale.

But Sera does not acknowledge it. Just gives Grace a skimming and sidelong glance, which is shaded by the dark smear of her own inky lashes and graced by the curve of a quite darling sort of half-smile and keeps rubbing Grace's spine, the knuckles of her left hand smooth over the knobby jointures of Grace's vertebrae.

"'course she does and 'course I did," Sera returns, full of affection for Dee and all the rest. "Dan and I met Dee and Rick back in North Carolina. Raleigh-Durham. Dee's got this brightness to her. And this physical, earthy fragility I can't fucking resist. I love the way she blushes. All-fucking-over."

Grace

"I love her gingerbread," Grace says, thinking with her stomach. "My roommates, when I tried that experiment out... not so nice. I had one draw a line down the dorm room and forbid me to step a toe over it. Made getting inside rather difficult. Sometimes I hung on to the door and swung over to my side, like her side was lava, but mostly that was to show her how dumb the idea was. But I like your roommates."

Grace talks, and as she talks, tries to ignore the fact that Sera is doing something weird with her spinal column. Sera just is this touchy feely person, and Grace supposes if spines are her thing, okay. Sure. That works. Odd, but you know, it's Sera. Whatever. So there's not much leaning in to the touch, or signs of her enjoyment, other than the general laziness of sitting on Sera's bed during a break from 'work'.

Serafíne

"People are fucked up, Grace." Grace's coughing fit has finally passed, and Grace has moved from thinking about coughing to thinking about spines and whether or not spines are Sera's thing, and spines, assuredly, are one of Sera's many things. Think of all those nerves tunneling through all that bone. Think of all of those electric currents. Think of all those sparks.

With the coughing fit over Sera gives Grace one last quiet, affectionate caress, the solid weight of her warm hand between Grace's scapulae, then pulls herself up onto the bedspread, cross-legged in her t-shirt and boxers, the chenille blanket still draped over her shoulders like a cape. The lick of chill from the half-open window bright against the heavy muskiness of the smoke in the air.

The bong is within Grace's reach. She can go for another hit or leave it be, just as she chooses. Sera is pleasantly high, enough that her body feels undulant even when it is still, which is really a rather lovely feeling, edged with golden.

" - really fucked up," Sera is going on. Giving Grace a lazy and philosophical look. And maybe Sera's talking about Grace's roommate or Dee or thinking of something else entirely, " - which doesn't really free us from the responsibility to try and love them anyway, you know? Even if it's only for a little bit. At some particular intersection of place and time. During one particular breath."

katabasis

embers in the instrument of smoke, smoke dissipating in the air, curling lazy drifting unmoored and look Serafíne look this is a vision this is your vision this is not an oracular vision this is like a quickening of the pulse a steady picking up of the heart's tattoo tempo quickening, yes, a quickening, this, what is this, what is this vision this is a vision the smoke should dissipate but for a moment it falls in reverse it coalesces out've the air and streams toward the lungs before a breeze watermelon-on-your-tongue bitter-salt-rind breeze kiss-of kiss like tip-of-tongue-to-tasting-tip-of-tongue that sort've breeze just a taste touches Serafíne then everything as usual embers in an ainstrument of smoke smoke dissipating in the air pot-smell lingering chasing and chased that fickle breeze-rill that is (was) so warm and is (was) so insistent for a moment sensation sense sensual something waiting behind the four chambers of the heart song shhh can't hear it shhh no it's not a song but shhh shhh shhh

Grace

"Yeah, maybe. One particular time, one particular place, for some. But you let the ones who bake you kickass ninjabread people live with you," Grace says, defiantly non-philosophical.

She retrieves the bong from the sill. Better to not let it go to waste, yes? All those smokey embers are busy getting the air high, which helps no one. And she takes another hit, breathing in... blowing out.

Not too long ago, those miraculous lungs were bleeding inside, and she wasn't coughing smoke up, but rather pieces of herself. This time, however, being so aware of her own breath comes comfort-wrapped.

She gives Sera a sidelong glance. She knows what Sera's really talking about, or thinks she does. Who else in their experience has been 'really fucked up'? Only Sera found a time and place to love them all. Somehow.

Serafíne

Defiantly non-philosophical Grace takes another lungful of marijuana and holds it in and coughs this time if she needs to cough and otherwise holds the smoke inside her body and there's magic happening as her blood pumps through her lungs, picking up oxygen and intoxication, both. Sera had a head start and is leaning back to settle herself on her elbows to watch Grace smoke and watch Grace's defiance of any and all philosophy and watch Grace's sidelong glances, as Grace thinks she knows what Sera is talking about Sera, for her part, thinks she is just fucking talking -

and then there is a moment which bends itself like a tattoo at the back of her throat. The sudden hammering of her heart there, higher than she remembered it, clotting up her esophagus and the drifting coil of something she cannot quiet remember and will never precisely forget rolling toward her rather than away. Coalescing, not dissipating.

Sera is breathless in those moments, not really paying attention to Grace, not really capable of paying attention to Grace, no and no. Her dark eyes are fixed before her and her mouth is open and there is an air of startlement, of wonder, evident in the easy arch of rather flat brows over her close set eyes. In the way her mouth is parted, as if she were about to receive communion.

And maybe she is.

--

It lasts a moment. Sera is affixed and then it passes and she's breathing in and drawing herself upright through the shoulders as she does so and giving Grace a startled, startling sort of glance with a strangely guilty edge to it before they are interrupted by Dan, knocking softly at the door to the bedroom, returning with beer.

Grace

Grace blinks a few times at Sera, and then, "Are you okay?"

Because Sera looks like she's just gotten a surprise. Whether it's a good one or a bad one isn't all that clear. The first thing that comes to Grace's mind is that perhaps a certain demonic entity has managed to attack from afar again. But she would feel that, right? She hopes she would feel that.

Sera doesn't respond. Maybe she never heard the first time, but then when her eyes come unfixed, Grace offers again. "Are you alright?"

And then, there is Dan, and the moment seems broken. And everything seems okay again.

Serafíne

"Course I am," Sera murmurs to Grace, pulled back into herself by something. The retreat of the smoke, the assertion of her consor's presence at the door or then, crawling over the bed, behind her as he presents Sera with her bottle of Jacobite and Grace with a bottle of locally brewed ginger beer. The non-alcoholic sort made with actual ginger and raw sugar and fresh water from some spring in the Rockies, even though Grace turned down a drink, just because.

And Sera's course I am feels solid and full and correct because of course she is alright, here in the room where she locked herself in to die. Of course, she's just fine.

Sera gives Grace a rather lazy, lingering smile and settles back into Dan's arms so he is obliged to stay and lounge on the bed with her and tells Grace, quietly. "I'm glad you came."

¿Qué tal?

Serafíne

Welcome to Thursday night at the chantry, and surely by mid-January the Christmas decorations have all been cleared away, put up in boxes and bells and bows for next year, god knows who will be here next year. Let us remember who was here last year, and how they left us all.

January has such a bright, clean, clarified sense to it. The sun comes earlier and stays later. The sidewalks and streets are stained with salt. The snow comes and comes and comes and sometimes it goes, leaving behind such stark, blasted looking pavement down in the city proper. Out here it lingers, doesn't it. In hollows on the north-facing slopes even when the sun comes out bright enough to make in melt in sub-freezing temperatures.

The warmth billowing off the hot spring melts everything in the immediate vicinity, creates strange, lacey impressions of hoarfrost on the sliders, so it is not immediately clear when seen from inside whether someone is soaking in the spring, communing with whatever the fuck they call the fundamental magic of the ode.

Unless you can feel them, out there.

Sera and Dan's van is in the driveway and Sera's guitar is propped up in a corner of the downstairs living area and Dan is puttering around doing something in the kitchen. Whistling. He's whistling. He's probably having a bit of a clean and thinking about some obscure B-side of The Cramps, the details of which have been niggling at the back of his mind and he probably promised Sera a hot toddy when she comes in from the spring but she hasn't come in from the spring yet.

It is cold outside but not freezing not yet but cold and damp and shiveringly so now that the sun has disappeared beneath the horizon. And Sera is still outside, sunk in the hotspring up to her neck, a bathsheet and robe carefully laid out for her right where one emerges from spring to flagstones, for the quick dash inside. Her eyes are closed. Her hair curls around her neck in damp and darkened snakes. The warm fog billows up all around her.

Pan

The evenings are cold enough to rid the mind of the notion that the brightness of the sun and the fleetingness of the snow mean anything. Not cold enough to kill but they've been fortunate this winter. Folks like Sera can soak in hot springs and not feel their hair freezing where it does not submerge.

Pan is not out here to soak in the spring. He is out here to smoke a cigarette and watch the stars come out. But he knows she's here. He has learned the resonances of the people who spend the most time here and he can tell most days when they are on the premises and when they have recently worked. Their spells linger like scents vulnerable to time and the passing of it.

When the sliding glass door opens Sera does not have to guess at who it is. Light come out into the darkness could be one of two men but this man is not like flying into the sun.

He clicks the lighter and draws a sooty breath before his voice reaches out to her.

"Serafíne," he says from some distance. "¿Qué tal?"

Serafíne

She has to feel him because she cannot see him; sits with her back to the house proper, facing the view of the mountains in the distance. The front range. She does feel him of course, behind her eyes and at the back of her throat; brightness without the enduring, drenching heat of the sun.

"Pan." Our Sera tips her head back on the flagstones to catch his profile and the reflection of it in the glass somehow in her peripheral vision. There's a curve to her mouth and a looseness to the gesture that suggests that she is high.

And pleased to see him, if that smile curving her cheek is any indication. "Hola."

So very, very pleased. "Feliz año nuevo."

Pan

Hard to tell whether Sera was high the first time she saw him. He can count on one hand the number of times he's seen her when she was not under the influence of a substance or a sphere and those times were as potent as the bad trips for what they signified. Abstinence was a focus for some of her Working. Not all of it. But that was her explanation for why she'd lost weight while he was down in Veracruz burying a dead man who did not stay dead.

"Happy New Year," he says with a smile staining his voice. Like they ain't seen each other since before this one arrived.

Today must not be a day he has to worry about getting blood on his hands. He's wearing bluejeans and a flannel shirt underneath his jacket. Dressed like that it's not hard to imagine him belonging to the land same as his parishioners once did. Like in another life he could have run a ranch or been a proper teacher instead of rising up out of his own ashes to prove God will take in those who've got nowhere else to go.

His hands had callouses once. Not from gripping the stock of a gun but from guiding tools and throwing a basketball around with the kids there after school. His hands have gone soft from so long in convalescence.

"How long you been out here?"

Serafíne

"Long enough that my fingers are all wrinkled," returns Sera with a quiet sigh of the sort that signals a delicious, physical contentment, warmth soaked into skin and muscle, blood and bone. There is a hint of laughter or perhaps wonder beneath the immediate physicality of her tone, and he can hear the water lapping as she brings those hands up to breach the surface, as if to show them off. See? Show and tell time.

"But only my fingers. Maybe my toes."

And she glances back at him, then. Over her shoulder, twisting far enough that he will have a glimpse of her profile, the curve of a cheek leading down her neck to the twist of a bare shoulder, and nothing more.

"You look like a cowboy." Which makes her smile, too. "Turn around."

Pan

"Turn around?" he says.

A pause to blow the smoke back out. He smokes fast. Big lungs that didn't grow tarred even though there wasn't much to do in either prison or seminary but smoke cigarettes and play cards. Less gambling in seminary but Anglicans aren't near as righteous in their piety as the Catholics are.

He does not turn around. He looks like he finds the request amusing but he does not laugh to let her hear it.

"Ain't nothing to see there."

Serafíne

Sera breathes out this huffed and quiet laugh. She's not looking at him anymore, though her profile is still cheated toward him and the curve of her mouth has that louche and lazy quality to it. High. A little bit high. Enough to make the ambient lighting dance across the water more than it would ordinarily, enough make her wonder at how her skin fits so seamlessly over her bones; and how it opens up sometimes, to everything, everything around her.

Enough to make her close her eyes for a quiet, singing minute, just feeling his powerful brightness behind her. The layers sensations of the others too.

"I'm getting out," she warns him, then, and it is not really much of a warning by now, more of a narration as she stands up, water sluicing down the elegant line of her spine, over her breasts, dark damp hair clinging to her shoulders and neck. Not entirely nude but certainly topless, braced against the bright, sparking shiver of the bitingly cold air which is such a contrast to the humid warmth of the pool.

She reaches for the fluffy white bathsheet left beside the pool and wraps it around her body, draping the hood over her head and pulling it close as she sets her teeth against the cold. Shimmying a bit to try to dry off before grabbing rather blindly for the robe to cinch over top of the towel.

"I told you to turn around," unless he has left, Sera's closer now. The robe over the towel, a hood over her damp hair. Her feet bare, her fingers damp, shivering as she reaches for his cigarette. "Let me have a drag."

Pan

With the warning Pan stops his joking and turns his back that she might maintain what's left of her modesty. Or that he might not find himself accused of immoral thoughts or actions later. Most of the stories in the Torah were meant to keep men in check anyway. Depending on who's doing the talking one can argue God gave up his only Son because he figured man was too wicked and depraved to follow all His rules. Might as well wipe the slate clean.

He hasn't finished his cigarette by the time she's gotten out the spring. Less than half remains but that's enough to get a buzz going.

She told him to turn around. That's where he is when she comes over to him.

"What happen, your shoes run away?" he asks after he's relinquished the cigarette.

Serafíne

The priest turns around anyway, which makes Sera smile both inside and in retrospect over his little joke. She has no particular modesty, except that which is bound up in her respect for him. Just ask her lovers. Any of them.

But he turns away and so she takes a few extra seconds, with the towel, with the sharp bite of the cold air against her skin contrasting against the billowing heat from the hot spring. With the robe, shrugging it over her shoulders and wrapping it around her body and then with the sudden, violent shivering that comes over her, overcomes her, for 2-3 seconds after she has gotten out.

And when she reaches him, his back his still to her, and she is an impressionistic smear against the glass and she nudges his back with her shoulder, all animal affection, before she demands a drag from his cigarette. Which she takes, damp fingers staining the filter darker.

"Thanks," Sera says, for the cigarette, handing it back and tipping her head aslant to briefly rest her brow against his shoulder, as she is wont to do. "You're the best."

Then, her eyes drop to her feet. And her toes, which wiggle. Apparently of their own accord. Like magic.

"Yes," she affirms, "they ran the fuck away."

Along with the rest of her clothes.

katabasis

a spark from the cigarette when she takes it or when she reaches it a spark in her mind's eye a spark that ignites touches her and for a moment can't she see look this is your vision a sheet of flame a kiss of the presentiment of fire taste smoke and seeds just-bitten seeds on her tongue when it shimmers on her wrist a translucent cloth-of-flame there behind the bat of her lashes behind that badum that break between one beat and the next figure-clothed-in no, it's gone, gone, find it, instead there's just a thready insistance don't her feet feel wet don't they gleam as if with oil palm oil honey palm oil and honey and seeds crushed on the tongue and a spark from a cigarette they ran the fuck away

Pan

[I DON'T NEED TO BE HERE FOR PMs PAUSE TIME ]

katabasis

[thar ees no more!]

Wedding Cookies

Serafíne

(Liz likes to roll dice. Per + Awareness.)

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 2, 2, 5, 7, 8, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 3

Serafíne

The knock on his door is solid and soft and sure and if he's awake and aware he knows who it is outside the bedroom he has claimed in the chantry. If he's awake and aware and alive to the buffeting currents of energy in and around the communal space he has to know she's here, doesn't he?

No one else feels like her.

--

But Sera, she felt him from a mile away.

Maybe five.

--

So she knocks. Tips her head against the door like it is the only thing holding her upright as she waits. The world is pleasantly sideways and she has pulled the hood of her cotton jacket up so that it half-shrouds her face and hair. Otherwise the hoodie is unzipped to reveal a see-through black lace halter-top over a push-up bra - black satin trimmed in hot pink ribbon, with hot pink roses, outlined in hot pink piping. Sera smells like rain and cloves and sugar; marijuana and pecans and a sweet undercurrent of something. If he takes more than a spare second or two to answer the door, she's looking away when he opens it.

There's a stray smear of powdered sugar on her lower lip that she has not yet licked away.

Pan

Time was she used to be able to find him at the quiet-bright rectory across the street from La Iglesia del Buen Pastor which was also bright but louder and surer than the brightness suffusing the rectory. The essence of his presence stopped lingering about a month after his hospitalization. When he went away to learn how to inhabit his own body again.

She used to bang on the door if she didn't just let herself in and he never asked her to stop. Never told her to. Even when the abuelitas began to chatter and Rosa began to berate him in the mornings when he'd come over tired and blinking away the tiredness but not complaining.

Rosa has prayed for patience and found herself having to do most of the work herself.

When Sera knocks on the door she does not have to wait long for her to open it. His feet are bare and he wears black trousers and an untucked black undershirt. Clothing from the day behind him hung up already. He does not look as though he was awakened from dreaming. A book lies facedown on the duvet behind him.

"Sera," he says, pleased but cautious all the same. Like he's expecting her visit is because of something having happened.

Serafíne

Sera half-falls as the door swings open and out from beneath her left shoulder. It is a fucking door and she asked the person behind it to please open it and still there is something about the way she falls that says that she is mildly surprised to find everything in working order; that she was leaning her weight into it without though about what might happen next.

"Pan."

So she half-falls, catches herself as she staggers a half-step into the room and - incidentally though not purposefully - into him and flashes him up a lazy sort of smile and her pupils are a bit dilated and something about the way she moves, as if the endpoints of her range of motion and the middle pieces too were cushioned, were wrapped in cotton wool, says that she is a little bit - and rather pleasantly - fucked up.

"I can come in." It could be a statement but it must be a question from the arch of her brows to the way he eyes first find his, then drift directionlessly off past his left shoulder before finding his eyes again.

There's something in her hands.

Which she has only just remembered, and likely then only because she has started to fall and needs to catch herself and also needs her hands for holding the thing in her hands. Which is a tin decorated with Christmas-y scenes and Sera's dark eyes drop from him to the tin and oh! a tin. She seems both surprised and pleased to find it there in her hands and watches it for a few drifting moments until oh! she hands it to him, biting her lower lip as her tongue darts out to catch the last bit of sweetness from the powdered sugar on her mouth.

"S'for you."

Pan

She nearly tumbles in but so long as he's stood in front of her and so long as he has his wits about him Sera will never fall. When she does not catch herself in an instant Pan reaches out a hand to take her elbow and give her steadiness that she finds on her own.

Finds his eyes after she's done sweeping the room. Never anyone inside his lodging with him when she comes around but the weight of his solitude sometimes makes it seem as though she's interrupting anyway. Like alone is the only time he can commune with his maker.

Still a surprise. She can come in.

"Course you can come in," he says.

He puts a hand on her shoulder like he would put a hand on the shoulder of anyone else come to his office asking for absolution or confession or both and in they go. No place for her to sit but the end of the bed. The borrowed bed is twice as large as the one to which he has become accustomed. A childhood grown into poverty and a young adulthood spent behind bars. Adulthood in the seminary and the priesthood circled back into poverty. He has to feel lost in a bed that large.

He takes the tin and plays at rattling it.

"What is it?" he asks like the point of a present isn't to open it. Leaves the door open.

Serafíne

The look Sera gives Pan when he catches her elbow and keeps her upright, keeps her from spinning outward in a widening arc, keeps her from falling - has a running thread of startlement in it, like someone waking from the strangest dream to find that lo their physical body is real. More than that, though, deeper and wider and brighter, is something so brief and kindled and unguarded that it makes her breath catch in her throat half-way down. The sensation lasts a fractional second and then the breath finishes and her lungs expand like opening wings and she's steady again, dropping her gaze to the odd gleam of his reading lamp over the painted, polished surface of the metal tin.

Sera feels his hand on her shoulder, the warmth and the weight of it, and it makes her feel all bright and present, and then she's tumbling onto the foot of his bed and kicking off her heels as she brings her legs up beneath her body to settle cross-legged on the rumpled comforter. Glances at the spine of the book he abandoned before following her instincts back to him.

The tin in his hand, rattling.

It sounds like cookies.

Oh hey, it is cookies.

"Wedding cookies," Sera is telling him probably was he is opening the tin to discover this for himself. Sera does not tell Pan that she all but stole them from the porch of his replacement. 'Course that guy doesn't really need cookies, does he?

Pan's church.

Pan's abuelitas.

Pan's fucking baked goods.

"They are really good." Says Sera, lean/swaying forward and lifting her chin rather winningly. She may or may not have the munchies. Then: "God this bed is so tiny. I guess though it's bigger than the one you had, huh."

Pan

Wedding cookies.

The irony of their name and their appearance as a gift combine to make the priest huff out a laugh before he takes them over to the edge of the bed to sit down beside the Cultist. He pries off the lid with his blunt nails and sets it aside so he can offer her the tin's contents.

What he doesn't know won't hurt him. He could figure out where they came from and where they were intended to go but Pan is not so paranoid as that. A time and a place for everything. This is not the time and the place to doubt her silence.

So he offers. He takes two of his own. He returns the lid to the tin and sets the tin down on the bedside table. Eats neatly so he does not attract ants spilling crumbs onto the floor.

"Yeah," he says of the bed being bigger than the one he's used to. Then: "Didn't know they made them any bigger."

Serafíne

Our Serafíne takes one of the cookies and pops it into her mouth whole and entire and allows the sugar to melt on her tongue. They are homemade. They are delicious. As the sugar dissolves the shortbread begins to as well. It is richer and nut-sweet and crumbly and Sera has powdered sugar on her hands and on her mouth and if this were a movie someone would need to kiss that powdered sugar off her mouth but this isn't a movie so she just licks her lips and her fingers and then - honestly - wipes them on her hoodie. Dan can deal with washing it later, and then Sera glances at the tin and thinks she wants another cookie and glances at Pan and thinks she wants other things and looks away and remembers the walls,

hold the ceiling up.

Hello walls!

And looks back at Pan, and the bed. And Pan, and the bed, disbelieving. "Seriously? My bed's like twice as big. You can fit a lot of people. I mean if you wanted to.

"This one's a good size though."

Pan

A glance to the tin becomes a glance to the priest and the priest interprets that different than Sera would have translated. He looks away to take the tin from its place on the bedside table. Its lid was loose on the base. When he takes it off this time he leaves it on the table. The tin he holds out to Sera before setting it on the duvet between them.

"It is. Does what I need it to do. I'll be back in the normal-sized bed soon enough."

Like a single-sized mattress is the standard by which all sleeping arrangements are set.

Serafíne

Strangely enough Sera takes the open tin on the duvet between them as an invitation to shift position and crawl up the side of the bed and somehow end up in a half-curl with the tin of cookies between them and the weight of her head supported by her left hand. There's ink on her skin there, the very very odd sharkscissors tattoo, and ink on her right hand, which she extends to take another one of the wedding cookies - which is a messy sort of thing but which Sera eats neatly, ducking her head close to the tin to catch excess sugar.

Her hood has fallen away from her hair. The heel of her right hand rests on the shaved side-cut. The rest - blond curls and dark dark roots - tumbles over her shoulders onto the bed.

Then she's chewing and stops chewing midmotion as he says he'll be back in the "normal-sized" bed again soon and her eyes are steady and a little bit haunted despite her evidence curl of intoxication. "You mean your place at the church, right? The rectory?"

Pan

"Claro."

Of course, he says. Like there's anywhere else in the world he could go if he weren't lodging here. Like he'd meant to abandon his congregation and leave a hole for the Bishop to have to fill. He hasn't spoken to the Bishop since he's come back from the Verbena's. For all they know he's still convalescing. They expect him to still be convalescing.

The doctors said he'd need outpatient physical therapy and rehabilitation for at least six months before he'd be ready to return to the task of standing in a hot airless sanctuary under heavy robes preaching and performing rites. Marrying couples and baptizing babies and hearing confessions.

Nothing else for him to do with his life but this task with Thakinyan is not finished. If he came back to his flock and then died fighting Thakinyan he would leave them even worse off than they are now. At least if he dies fighting Thakinyan Rosa can lie to them. Say he threw a clot or had another stroke or something.

"I'm not gonna be staying here - " Here. At the Chantry. " - much longer."

Serafíne

Sera is trying not to think about the demon, or anything to do with the demon, or the fact that Pan may die fighting a demon. She does not know the demon's name or manifestation; she has not touched an object or memory associated with that film since -

- since,

- since,

and yet she is aware of it all, of course she is. Her eyes gleam moist in the low light and now she's done with the cookies. Would reach for the lid and replace it if it were in her reach, and she breathes out, ragged and fine and slow.

"I missed you when you were gone. Went over there sometimes, anyway. But I guess Rosa told you that."

Pan

"Rosa don't tell me nothing."

Not entirely true. Her job is to tell him what happens in his absence. But she does not tell him what the Awakened population is up to. She has left Sera out of her phone calls out to the Verbena's farmhouse. No point getting his blood pressure up if he's coming back from a stroke. Plenty of ways to justify her omissions of action but Pan's health is always the primary concern.

He isn't oblivious to her suffering. Her suffering is an apparent thing. It comes up buoyed by drugs and drink and disastrous evenings. Pan doesn't ask what happened tonight to bring this on. He looks at her though and he sees the glimmering eyes.

The tin goes back to the bedside table and he sighs. Reaches out to rest his hand atop the part of her head that is not shaved.

"Vale," he tells her. It's alright.

Serafíne

Vale he tells her and it makes her smile as she breathes in the world. Oh, that smile is compelling, lovely, genuine. Hawksley offered to pay her if she dressed up like an angel and went to church on Christmas and she didn't but she might've and nearly every waking hour you would call her anything but an angel except for that name she wears, that name someone chose for her, which in the end just means burning one, doesn't it?

But see: when she smiles like that she could be an angel, the genuine awareness of pleasure and its passing, of life and its fragility, of the places wear human bodies meet and where they collide. The tensile frailty of this human world.

Vale he tells her, and "I know," she says, with that rather aching smile. Turning her head into the weight and warmth of his hand. "I do.

"And when you were in the hospital I came to see you. Every day I could. That last day, with Katiana though, I couldn't make myself walk through the front doors to that place."

Pan

"It's alright," he says again.

English this time. Pan smooths back hair from Sera's brow like she could imagine he would smooth back hair from his son's forehead when he was lain in his crib newborn and still his. Ana never gave him back his custodial rights. She didn't have to. Eventually the boy became an adult and now he doesn't need anybody to take care of him.

He took care of just about everybody else when he came back to Colorado over the summer. He wasn't here on vacation. A phone call brought him back.

"Ana told me. I know you were there." His hand rests. "It's today though, huh? Stay here."

Serafíne

"I don't think she liked me," Sera is speculating, with an indulgent smile that says that Sera liked Ana and her eyes are going a little bit far away, holding the memory of Ana watching over Pan like a stone beneath her tongue. The web of connections unbroken, no matter how far we fall away from where and whom and why we were, then. Far away, she's amending, " - or maybe she did." quietkly and mostly to herself, because it does not matter to Serafíne particularly whether or not Ana liked her.

Then - It's today though, huh? Stay here. - and she closes her eyes and her brows are drawn as she feels the prick of pain, of awareness, lovely, spiking right through her strange and fickle and open and wounded heart and smiles around that wound and nods her head, quietly, firmly, beneath his hand, as much to feel the way his hand slides over her hair with the movement as for anything else. Yes the nod says. Of course she will stay.

Of course, of course.

"When you were in the ICU," Sera is telling him. "I wanted to stay with you. I couldn't stand that place but I wanted to be there and she wouldn't let me and Rafa wasn't here yet and I told her that you shouldn't be alone.

"She said, you weren't."

Pan

"Claro."

Of course. He was in a hospital. He was surrounded by doctors and nurses and other patients. Besides them his god was watching over him. The same god who put into his path people who cared about him and could help him. The same god who could and would do nothing if he had gone to the ground alone.

Even at the end of all that the angel that came to him in prison is never gone from him. She does not manifest outside of seekings for him and none of them talk about their guides and guardians but She was there. If he had died She would have brought him home.

But that isn't what Sera means. That isn't what she means at all.

"I didn't do right by Ana. I don't think she didn't like you. She's got a good heart, yeah? She's a good woman. She's had to be tough, though. You understand."

His hand braces the back of her head like the next thing he's going to do is going to be to kiss her forehead. But he doesn't. He lets her go.

"C'mon. Let's get you a toothbrush and something to sleep in."

Serafíne

No, that Angel, that fucking God of his, that isn't what Sera means at all.

--

His hand braces the back of Sera's skull and Sera half-closes her eyes, expecting that kiss, expecting the dry brush of his mouth, all chaste, over her brow. Like a blessing. She's just a little bit fucked up, enough that when her eyes half-close, the moment stretches out like taffy. For several heartbeats, she does not know or understand how to get in or out of it.

But the priest is talking to her. A toothbrush. Something to sleep in. She is going to tell him that she doesn't usually sleep in anything. She just sleeps, but she remembers what he is as she straightens and takes in his profile, the scruff of his beard, and her shoulders are straight and she is very quiescent then, Sera, childlike in the manner of well-mannered drunks.

The toothbrush is easy. Something to sleep in is rather more difficult. One of his t-shirts, in the end, too large for his currently frame and therefore large enough to hit Sera mid-thigh. Clean but folded up with the rest of his clothes and stored in his room for long enough that it smells like him under and over the scent of the detergent stocked in the chantry.

After brushing her teeth, Sera pads back to the priest's room and sits on his bed and then climbs into it, beneath the covers. Warm as the day was, tonight the temperature will drift below freezing and snow will fall; gently, an inch or two out here, where the plains are beginning to rise, less in the city proper.

Sera curls up facing the wall and there's room for both of them and she intends to give him that room and for all that she has seemed more well and solidly and truly herself over the past few weeks - throwing a party, showing up drunk and stoned at the chantry, trying - with shining eyes - to counsel Grace about the freighted weight of a weapon-in-hand - the nights are different. At night sometimes, she's still in a white room and the door is locked. No one comes and no one goes and there is no way out, and she knows that she will die here.

It is not a nightmare, this. Just the knowledge in her bones. When Sera finally falls asleep she sleeps the way she always has done: so deeply and entirely that she is hard to wake. In those quiet moment before sleep takes her, though, sometimes -

she shakes,

and shakes,

and shakes.

I know.

Hawksley

It's later, and it could be hours and it very well could be days. It depends on how long the party goes on after that smoke with Pan, after that song in the kitchen. Time has more more and less meaning for Sera than it does for most people; Hawksley keeps an eye on it but time is really something other people need to concern themselves with. The passage of days, the appropriate time for meals. That's why he has Collins. Collins is his watch and calendar.

When he is in the Corona Street house, slightly buzzed but far more high, he does not think about time at all.

--

When she comes upstairs to her room next, Hawksley is lying there in those white jeans and that white belt. His socks and shoes are off, his shirt is off, and he is spread-eagle on her rumpled bedcovers, wingspan open, head tilted back, breathing in and out rhythmically as though in meditation. He senses her before he hears her, or sees her, and his eyes are opening as the door is closing.

"Maxine," he says hypnotically, and she knows he is reciting.

"back from a weekend with her boyfriend, smiles like a big cat and says that she's a conjugated verb." One of his eyebrows flicks upward, arching like a gossip's. "She's been doing the direct object with a second person pronoun named Phil, and when she walks into the room, everybody turns:"

Hawksley smiles and rolls to his side, but does not prop himself up. He rests his head on his bicep, watching her. "...some kind of light is coming from her head," he muses, as though he is seeing this right now. "Even the geraniums look curious, and the bees, if they were here, would buzz... suspiciously around her hair, looking for the door in her --"

he knows this is funny, this is too perfect: "-- corona."

Sighing, Hawksley rolls onto his back again, closing his eyes. "We're all attracted to the perfume of fermenting joy," he mutters, as though to himself. "We've all tried to start a fire, and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own."

Perhaps she has come closer, and he opens his eyes because he can smell her now, looking up at her. "In the meantime, she is the one today among us most able to bear the idea of her own beauty." His arms slide closer to his sides, and bend, and he pushes up on them, forearms flat and chest pulling a bit tighter with the motion. "And when we see it, what we do is natural."

Now is when he realizes he cannot finish in this position. He sits up all the way, drawing his knees up, heels to the bedspread, legs apart, back a strong but subtle curve as his elbows come to rest on his akimbo'd knees. "We take our burned hands out of our pockets," he whispers, looking at her, "and clap."

Which he does, softly and slowly, three times.

Serafíne

There are so many ways to get buzzed in that house and just as many ways to get high. Music still resonant from somewhere. Laughter in the garden. More people than was likely legal for a building of this size at some point in the thick of the night, silver paper drifting through the air, brightly chaotic, reflective as a light, glistening, subarctic snowfall. Still more people in the house even now than it has rooms or bedrooms or perhaps even space on surfaces appropriate for sprawling where one might lay down, as if for rest.

--

And: later. Hours or days and it hardly matters to the two of them and the party will sprawl on in some vagrant form or another for quite literally more than a week. Whenever it is is later and the house is almost as quiet as it will ever be on these days. Night stains the sky but dawn will come, and sooner than one might imagine. Sera's hair is loose and a bit tangled, the curls gone blowsy, her lipstick has more or less worn itself off her mouth, or maybe she's kissed it the fuck away. This does not stop her from giving him a crawling smile when she finds him where she knew she would - shirtless in the middle of her rumpled bed.

That smile changes when he begins to recite. She's still halfway across the room, closing the door quietly behind her, feeling it clock home, her spine against the wood, her hands behind her body, just that click, solid, precise. The latch in its groove, the mechanism tumbling home.

She breathes in. Her eyes are closed those first few phrases. She savors the sound of his voice as if it were a solid, physical, tangible thing - a caress. The heaviest sort. She is not still like this for long; and indeed soon enough there is her scent. Her shadow across the bed. Her weight depressing the mattress, her knee on the edge, and her hands, fists forward as she leans toward him.

--

He claps, three times. She breathes in sharply, her eyes quick on him and crawls forward, urging him backwards, prone, first with her eyes and then with her hands and then with her body. She has not quiet bent to kiss him, but he knows that she is going to do that, and soon.

The way she's smiling at him; no small hint of wonder in his eyes.

"Who wrote that?" Sera is asking him, this remarkable light in her eyes. "How do you always know these things to say. How do you find them in your mouth when you need them. When I kiss you, will I taste them there?"

Hawksley

And he can get high on life. Hawksley, when buzzed, can watch sounds move through the air like colors. He can see people as networks of electrical impulse. He can see the world as so much more than they think it is, and in the end he decided to come up here to this sacred place, this shrine to Sera, who did not dress up as an angel even though he said he'd pay her if she did but he would not go to church with her so he dressed up as an angel even though,

really,

the costume doesn't suit him.

--

Leaning close to him, their noses are inches apart, their eyes bright in the darkness, and when he gives his three soft claps he relents. She stalks him backward and he lowers himself, not a flop but the smooth, controlled recline of core strength. She climbs over him and his chest lifts on an inhale.

"I did," he lies, and obviously so, because he can't keep a straight face. But he gives her many answers: "Tony Hoagland. It's called 'Grammar'. I thought of it when I met you. I read a lot. Magic. I don't know."

Serafíne

I did he tells her, and

"Liar," she says, her mouth spreading around the word. It is not an accusation. If there is any sting in the term, well, she kisses it out of his mouth. Her knees are on either side of his chest and her fists punch down into the pillow top on either side of his head and her hair is loose and smells like cloves and pot and Christmas and Sera, absolutely like Sera.

The kiss is slow and deliberate and she is tasting the way his mouth opens beneath her own, opens to her own. Opens.

Then she pulls away - not far, just gives him his mouth back so that he can give her those answers. He reads alot. He's fucking magic. He doesn't know if she'll taste the words on his tongue.

"I think I did taste them," she's telling him, but some of it is oblique and strange and some of it is reflective and bright and her nose glides against his and their mouths are close enough that he can feel rather than see the crescent curve of her smile. "And you do read a fucking hell of a lot.

"Do you know what I got you as a Christmas present?"

Hawksley

A flicker of light in his pristine pale eyes at the word, even though he technically did just lie. An obvious lie, but still: the light flickers, and then renews, and he smirks. She kisses him, and his eyes close, his mouth slow on hers. Lazy. Savoring. They kiss for a long time. At some point his hand comes up to bury itself in her hair, his fingertips massaging her scalp.

They part just as slowly, and she tells him she thinks she tasted the poetry on his tongue. He smirks again. Her question: his answer:

"It wasn't in any of the books. What did you get me?" And here he bites her lower lip, a quick one. No reason.

Serafíne

Sera makes a noise that is decidedly not a wimper when he bites her lower lip. It is closer to a growl. Then she does something absurd: opening her mouth and scraping her teeth along the bearded line of his jaw. Her mouth glides over his ear and she spends quite a while nuzzling him there, her nose against the lobe, her tongue against the hollow beneath, tasting his pulse, alive to his every reaction and savoring each and every one.

Teeth scrape over the cartilage - little nips that are firm, but not cruel.

"I made you space - a whole fucking shelf - on my bookshelf. You can fill it up with whatever you want. Whenever you want. I won't even cover it up with a pile of clothes."

Hawksley

Considering that the second or third time they met she was doing things like biting his temple, Hawksley's threshold for 'that was weird, Sera' is set pretty high. She's a Cultist. He's lucky she hasn't asked him to hang from hooks on the ceiling yet, for fuck's sake. So her scraping her teeth over his lightly bearded jaw doesn't shock him. He just smiles, lazily, stoned-ly, closing his eyes as she gives him her raw, visceral sort of affection.

Time slips out of his grasp like water through his fingers. That is all right. He encircles her with his arm, helping her down to lie beside him a bit firmly, because snuggling.

She made him space on her bookshelf. He blinks his eyes open, turning to look at her, his expression inscrutable primarily because he has not quite sorted out his reaction yet. "But... I don't want anything when I come here. I come here because you're here. If I need something, I just... bring it."

Or leave.

This is the point where we marvel at how smooth he is and how good he is at accepting gifts, gestures, offers like this. Meaningful things.

Serafíne

Sera is still wearing that ridiculous green velvet dress. The one with the long sleeves and the rabbit fur and the deep vee and the leather lacings all the way down to her navel. She has lost somewhere during the evening the push-up bra she added to give herself the cleavage that lacings like that seem to demand. Take it off, given it away. Burned it maybe in the chiminea in the garden: who fucking knows.

So he pulls her down to lie beside him because snuggling and her spine arches against his hand as he does so but she goes; of course she does. Drops her mouth his shoulder and the laces are starting to come undone and her dark eyes are now slanting across the hard planes of his torso. Her right hand follows, down the solid slabs over muscle flanking his ribs, over the hard plane of his stomach, thoughtful, savoring, seeking.

"See, I thought maybe sometimes you come over here. We fuck or we get high and we fall asleep. Or hell, maybe you're just here - " that thought she doesn't really finish, "and maybe you wake up in the middle of the night and want to read one of those books that would drive me mad and hey, there they are. But fuck it, you don't have to put anything on it. I could just fill it up with my stuff. That fucking angel costume you were going to pay me to wear. To church, On Christmas.

"It'd still be yours."

Hawksley

She will not be wearing it long. Hawksley's hand that is not wrapped around her back is already toying with the lacings, even as he is failing to graciously and humbly accept this generous offering. It's a loaded gift, though. And of all the things playing through his eyes and she sees every one of them, most likely, it's the wariness that is starting to surface most overtly. The way he rolls a leather lace between thumb and forefinger is only somewhat lascivious and is in other parts a bit anxious.

Granted, they are coming undone, and his eyes skate down her body to look, of course he looks, and that numbs his anxiety a bit. Breasts, after all. He thinks of her in Vegas, topless and swimming and gorgeous. He thinks that when he is with her he hates winter all the more, it's a ridiculous season, they're supposed to never be out of the sunlight. He wants to cup her tit in his mouth and suck for a good long while. Until summer. Until spring, at very least.

And she touches him, appreciating his chest and the fact that it is bare, and she explains that maybe when he stays he could just have a book here and then, perhaps, he would not leave to go get it and read in his own house instead. Which he has done before.

He breathes in. He doesn't have to put anything on it, and it would still be his, and oddly, this does comfort him. He drops the laces and puts both arms around her now, closing his eyes, just holding her. And he's done that before too, especially when she was so weak. Especially when she was recovering. He stayed. Sometimes he did bring books here, he remembers, and he would read in bed while she slept her strength back, stroking her hair and telling her shh. shut up, Sera, I'm reading when she would struggle in sleep or briefly stir, uncertain of where she was, afraid she was in a hospital, but

nope. Bed smelled like her and Hawksley was scritching her scalp and telling her to be quiet so he could study whatever-the-fuck and it was decidedly not pristine or anything like a hospital, and she would sleep again.

She got him a shelf. She acts like she got it and there's no receipt, so it's his, whether he uses it or likes it or not. And he is comforted the way she would be comforted, when his shushing reminded her that she wasn't trapped anywhere at all, just... sleeping next to Hawksley. Who was not sleeping, but picking apart the universe to learn its secrets.

--

He exhales, and lowers his brow to hers. "I'm sorry I'm such a fucking douchebag," he says quietly. "Thank you," he adds, and kisses her brow.

Serafíne

Sera would disagree with Hawksley about winter. Winter is a perfectly reasonable season. It gives her the excuse to wear green velvet elf costumes trimmed with white rabbit fur matched with patent leather belts and patent leather boots, and leather laces down to her navel. It gives him the chance to take all of these things off her body.

They are not, however, talking about seasons they would keep and those they would discard.

Her eyes are on him; neither particularly sharp nor especially piercing, but quick as they so often are. As in, to the. And she sees the way the sight of her breasts numbs that rising anxiety - a bit - and worms her right shoulder in a way that pulls the bodice of the dress open, so that not even a shred of fabric obscures his sight line, offering him a better - perhaps more comforting - view. Something about her posture - the arch of her spine, the rotation of her shoulder - means that her breasts strain against the laces. Well, that's lovely too.

--

They're facing each other now; brow to brow, and her eyes are open so that her view of him is strange and piecemeal, like a Picasso painting - immediate, intense, but out of focus. They are close enough just then that her lashes brush against his lower lip as he lifts his mouth to plant that kiss on her forehead. She has lowered her gaze, her eyes all half-lashed - not in shyness or modesty, but from a quiet, abiding pleasure - in him, in his immediacy, in the fact of him, his solid body and booze-tinged breath and the way his scent, and hers, and maybe even a half-dozen strangers' cling to his skin - so deeply and immediately and entirely felt that that that quiet, abiding pleasure feels immodest, brazen. Strangely obscene.

"Liar," she tells him, then, "you're not a fucking douchebag," and even if he cannot see her mouth just then, he can sense her smile from the curve of her cheek, the supple shift of tension in her temple as her mouth curves wider. Her voice is quiet and there's something playful there, yes, when she says liar, the way her tongue shapes the word so very precisely, but the stillness feels real and solid and deep. "You're a Hawksley."

Because he's not a fucking douchebag.

And he is very much a Hawksley.

Briefly and firmly and even fiercely, Sera leans her brow into the pressure of that kiss. Then she's pulling back; not to break contact but to make it: eye contact. Sera finds Hawksley's eyes and she holds them.

"It wasn't meant as an anchor." The depth of that eye contact is remarkable. She means every goddamned word. "I don't want you to do anything but soar."

Hawksley

Even "liar" is a pretty word in Sera's mouth, less so "douchebag" though not by a wide margin. Hawksley pays attention to her breasts, and the laces loosening over them, and he's far from oblivious so he knows she's reacting to him, like she gets that yes, tits make everything in the world a bit easier to deal with. He already knows he's a coward and that he will most likely remain a coward, at least in certain things, but oh well: there are still boobs.

And he brings his hand up and covers one of her breasts with his broad palm, elegant fingers, closing his eyes for a moment as he very simply holds her, weighs her breast in his hand, breathes out as through laces or air or green velvet, he feels her nipple hardening to the touch. Yes. That's lovely, too.

She draws back and so his eyes open to see where she is going. His hand does not move -- not away, at least. He considers the shortness of her hemline and the pleasing hint of her derriere it affords, decides he wants to get a better look at what she is or may not be wearing beneath it, wants to get his mouth on that bit of flesh on the back of her leg where ass becomes thigh, and he is steadily arousing himself with her nearness and her body pressed up against his and, of course, his hand on her breast.

Her eyes, though.

Damn.

Not an anchor, she says, and he is briefly tugged from thinking about her in ways both carnal and obscene and only sacred if you're Sera, and his lips twitch in a smile. "Thank you, Sera," he says, rather than apologizing again. His hand smooths up her chest, her clavicles, the side of her neck, into her hair, rubbing his fingertips on her scalp, like she's a cat or something. Or dog. Or a Sera.

"My gifts for you are way more materialistic," he quips.

Serafíne

Even her bedroom is decorated, lights framing the windows framing the garden view and they are on and unobtrusive but cast a rather charming and reflective glow over the whole of the scene.

And our Serafíne, she smiles. Curls her head back into the pressure of his fingertips on her scalp, his hand twined through her hair just precisely like a cat or a Sera. Her body follows, first the shoulders, then a fine, spreading, quite nearly architectural arch that spreads through her spine as she lays back on the bed, her half-lashed eyes are occluded with fixed on his as she just - wordlessly offers herself to him. Or the universe. Either, both.

Hard to imagine the shadows that overlaid her; that still sometimes overlay her when she smiles at him like that, quietly simmering and wanton and willing and delighted by his presence in her bed. By his existence in the multiverse. By the shadow of desire in his eyes. By the way his heart pounds. She wants to eat him the fuck up.

"Was it drugs?" Sera is tossing back, still pressing her head into the curve of his hand. Twisting her shoulders, curving her spine, wriggling her goddamned hips. Because she wants to. Because her body feels the way it feels, which is delicious, entirely delicious right now. The movement rucks up the sawtooth hemline of that absurd little dress and lo, Hawksley discovers that - if she started the evening wearing some sort of underwear, well, it did not last the night. She's wearing nothing beneath that dress. "Did you get me drugs? I'll let you feed them to me, one by one. Like grapes. Each one a new surprise.

"Maybe while we fuck."

Then, really before he can react or respond, a new light in her eyes. Which looks almost precisely like one of those metaphorical lightbulbs going off over her head: just so. Her expression changes, she catches her lower lip with her teeth and smiles all around it and there's this bright spark in her dark gaze and she's all in sudden motion. Shifting - bouncing up, really - to settle on her knees by his hips.

"You got me this," leaning into him and over him, Sera reaches down to find and cup his erection through his jeans, quite the way he held her breast. That sort of mindfulness, that awareness of his reaction to her. She gives him a bit of a squeeze, her hooded eyes never leaving his through perhaps his have left hers as she tells him, "It's just what I wanted." Voice rough with desire. Her heart beating the way it beats, so fucking strong. "I might have to take my time unwrapping it, though."

And she leans over him, plants her open mouth below his navel, above the waistband of his white jeans, her tongue rough on his skin. She's still holding him, too, through his jeans, like she's never going to let him go.

"Make Christmas last."

Hawksley

It's been easier, after that first/last time, when he held her on his lap while he played Scrabble with Dee, and how he had nothing to offer her but his mouth when she was done telling him about the Hydra, and how that was enough. It feels easier, less fragile, when his hand slides into her hair now, when she leans into him, and against him. And that ease is so treacherous, in its way.

"Not drugs," he teases her, a grin flashing across his face. He looks like he just caught the prey he's been chasing all morning. He looks like he's returned to some high branch after diving to pluck some silvery-flashing thing from a river. His fingertip strokes her jawline from earlobe to chin. "That would be like giving ice to an Eskimo, Sera."

But her eyes are lighting up, and she is -- quite frankly -- putting her hand on his junk. He huffs a laugh, his own eyes flickering in response, as he rolls onto his back beside her. He wouldn't dream of denying her access. He just reclines, eyes closing, opening again only to fixate more firmly on her, trail over her. She squeezes; he breathes in sharply, pressing himself into her hand. "That's mine," he exhales, grabbing her wrist, but not to push her away. To keep her there. His tongue slips out over his lips, unabashed. His eyes flutter closed, then open again, like he doesn't want to take his eyes off of her,

because he doesn't.

"Don't st--" he's saying, when she bends over him. She isn't, though. She's kissing him, soft lips to bare skin, rough tongue on the hard ridges of his abdominals. She's still touching him. Hawksley has it in mind, briefly, to tell her that no, that's not her present, but he'd be happy to share with her for a while, but he's not got the processing power to determine if this is cheesy as fuck or not and she is rapidly removing what little mindfulness he has. He looks at her, eyes burning now, no longer flickering or sparking but gleaming with that molten core of heat that he has.

"Come here," he tells her.

Serafíne

She seems so solid right now, Sera. Immediate and tangible and physical, exactly the way a Sera should be. The arc of movement as she leans into his touch; the glimpse of her teeth when she laughs, lightning-quick and open mouthed, at his quip about ice and Eskimos. The warm flush of a well-fed buzz glowing beneath her skin, making itself felt particularly at the end ranges of her motion, where she can almost feel her skin bleeding into the molecules or what the fuck ever - the atoms and smaller, and smaller, and smaller still - of everything all around them, and the everything all around them bleeding right back into her. The glow of desire in her eyes, when she manages to focus them on him, is merely and simply wanton. All consuming, torrential desperation seems so very far away.

--

Sera seems to like that joke about the ice and Eskimos. She laughs more than it perhaps warrants, opens her mouth like she's tasting his words in the air and would throw something on the border of mad and inane right back at him and insist that drugs would be a perfect present (because darling, she would very much like some) except her hand and soon her mouth are otherwise occupied.

He lays claim to his junk (that's mine) which she is quite boldly exploring and she hums, not a skeptical hum just a quiet, rather sweet hum of acknowledgment, which sharpens into a hungry, rather fierce little laugh as he grabs her wrist. Something about the gesture makes her breath catch in the back of her throat. That, too, he can feel, because her mouth is on his stomach now, open.

And, you know, lovely the way she's bent over him, her long hair spilling over his solid, rippling core, that silly goddamned dress she is wearing half-off her now, the laces loosened so far that the plunging neckline has opened enough to bare one lovely shoulder and one point five lovely breasts, which brush against his flank and hip as she moves.

Don't st- he's starting to tell her, except she isn't stopping, who the fuck thinks that Sera would stop anything like this once she's started. Still, it makes her smile. She lifts her mouth from the hard, flat plane of his stomach to his cock. The outline of it through his jeans. Starts kissing him, open-mouthed, her tongue a warm, solid pressure, between the soft heat of her lips, right through the rough denim.

And she's started unbuckling his white belt and she's doing it one-handed because she's stroking him with the other and so that rather clumsy work is the counterpoint to the slow, deliberative movement of her mouth, until he tells her to

come here,

and she looks up, then, her mouth still open over his hard cock, which is still confined in his white jeans, and finds his eyes all molten on her, which is something she finds very hard to resist.

Sera considers, briefly, just fucking ignoring him and undressing him slowly and sucking him off exactly the way she intends to do right now, but there is that liquid heat in his eyes, which always stops her heart, and then restarts it, just a little bit faster.

So she lifts her mouth from his cock and drops it back to his abdomen and gives him a very deliberate kiss and opens her mouth and starts climbing her way back up his body, scraping her teeth over his rather remarkably well-cut muscles, breathing out warm and humid to sooth any roughness as she moves. And she leaves her hand where it was, though she's now stroking him, with a casual though double-stepped rhythm, smile that is more felt than seen widening whenever he takes in another one of those sharp breaths. Biting him sometimes, for emphasis, when he exhales.

Leaves her hand where it was as long as she can but he's fucking taller than she is and there is only so far that she fulfill both requests.

"Don't stop," she is telling him, when she's close. Close enough to rest her chin on his shoulder, or maybe even hover her mouth over his. "Come here. Silly boy, I don't have your wingspan. I can't do both."

Hawksley

"God, you're so high," he tells her when she's laughing way too much at that rather dumb Eskimo joke, but her stupid laughter makes him laugh too, even if it's not as much. He smiles at her, teasing her face with his fingertips for a bit before they are doing other things, thinking other things, and he is not smiling but staring at her, fixed on her, telling her to come here, only to find that she is now kissing him, licking him through the heavy but soft white denim.

Still, he tells her to come here. He knows what she's thinking, though he's never been much of one for the study of the sphere that would let him know for sure. He knows because he's seen that look in her eyes before, right before she pulled down his swimsuit and ate him alive in a covered cabana in Vegas. He knows because he knows her, like this. And in other ways.

Sera comes there. Bites and kisses her way up his body the way she does, the way she is given to, and skin and velvet both slide over him and make him breath in, because of course she's still stroking him, stroking him until she's not, and accusing him of forgetting that actually, she is quite tiny. He huffs a laugh and doesn't answer. His hands come up from her body, of course they were on her body, running over her sides and her shoulders and over the velvet and slipping under it. Now they come up to her neck, her face, cupping her jaw in his hands to draw her mouth to his.

That's all he wanted. It wasn't too much to ask, was it?

He has a feeling nothing is too much to ask of her, and this suspicion wraps like a hand around his viscera, around the column of his spine, tightening until he cannot move.

--

But he kisses her, deeply and consumingly, pulling her nearer until his arms are folding behind her and he is sinking back in her bed, panting against her mouth, until he is reaching down between them and his knuckles brush her and the feel of her wetness makes him shudder but does not dissuade him from his belt, front button, zipper, undressing blindly while he kisses her.

"Just like this," he mutters to her mouth, and so it is just like that. The white jeans and he's wearing fucking golden underwear are pushed down, the rich green velvet doesn't need to be pushed up because it is already so short, and that is all. This time he doesn't ask her if she's sure, he doesn't stop, he doesn't hesitate unless she stops him, asks him if he's sure, hesitates. The few guests who are still conscious can hear them outside the door, hear their breathing, their panting, the little cries Sera is letting out, the soft worshipful swearing Hawksley exhales as she moves on him.

They roll near the end, and people outside the door and down the stairs can hear them a little under the music that is playing, always playing in this house somewhere, hear the way she reacts, the sound she makes every time he thrusts, but for all her kitschy surroundings this is a fine bed and the springs don't creak even if the headboard thuds a bit, rhythmic against the wall. Hawksley pushes himself up on his arms, watching her beneath him, that same fixed, piercing, hungry look in his eyes.

Until they close.

Until he goes very still, shoulders trembling from strain, his hips shuddering as he does not so much lose himself as finds something entirely new outside of himself.

It lasts for a moment, as it does. And only that moment before it lets him go again, before gravity reasserts itself, before he slides into her again, again, as though trying to recapture it or trying to slow that fall but this is not a magic he has and perhaps not really a magic he wants. He kisses her neck when he comes down over her, weight on his forearms because, really, she seems so fucking fragile to him. He kisses her neck and nuzzles under her hair and mutters something about her triangle and tells her, again, though she doesn't know it is Again:

'ana ' sef. 'ana ' sef, serafíne.

And kisses her, and kisses her, until he cannot move anymore.

Serafíne

Hawksley tells Sera things in languages she does not know. He tells her Again and she does not know it is again and she does not have anything close to words herself now, not anymore. Not after he tells her to come here because he just wants to kiss her, because it wasn't really so much to ask, because -

yes Hawksley

- nothing is ever too much to ask.

And she is so fucking high. She laughs at that moderately terrible joke far too much and is delighted in the weight of his hands on her body and gets lost in hte map of his skin on her travels back up his body from his belt to his mouth because there are places that require exploration, because she did not know that that fit there, because she's stoned and so pleased with him, and wriggles with a deep and satisfying sigh as he diverts her from her intended course and takes her along another rather equally delightful path.

There are not many words after that. He undresses himself while kissing her and she herself does not require any undressing and she won't see his golden fucking underwear until some later time, but of course she will be immoderately pleased by it, whether or not she is high. He mutters something into her mouth them and she hardly understands it, just nods her agreement back to him, her hands cupping his skull, her mouth on his or close to it, holding the fuck on to him as she takes him, with nothing close to hesitation.

--

They roll, and his eyes are open and he's looking down at her and her eyes are mostly open in those moments, but unseeing because she is just so close to all the many things she cannot name, and they're leaking tears that smear down her cheeks in salt-laden little trails, but she can't help that, can she? Can't help it anymore than she can help any of the rest of it. The way she cries and the way she comes and the way she wraps herself up in him and around him as he kisses her, and kisses her, and kisses her, all the oxygen from her lungs.

'ana 'sef. 'ana 'sef, serafíne. he tells her, and she has no fucking idea what he's saying, but that hardly even begins to matter.

He cannot move anymore. She wraps her long, lean arms around him, elbows bent all akimbo, and pulls him down and down, onto her, over her.

And tells him, quite simply, "I know."

Hawksley

Well, he is a coward and he insists he's not a liar just because he says something in a language that he knows she can't understand. It's not his fault she chose to learn Spanish instead of Egyptian Arabic. She made her bed and she can lie in it.

He can lie in it, and does, and has often, and he does not know that she hasn't been sleeping around or that she was going to kiss Pan beneath the mistletoe and he doesn't have the faintest idea that she has such a crush on the priest, all he knows is that Pan looked at her with almost paternal affection and that Sera looked at him the way, well, the way Hawksley sees her look at almost everything in the universe, with boundless and incredible love.

ah

He ends up kicking off what is left of his clothing. This is later: he also peels off the rest of that little elfin dress and doesn't ask about her other Awakened guests, where they are or were. He knows he is sleeping here. Entitled little fuck that he is; he doesn't even question it. So he makes her naked and he makes himself naked and sighs and licks, softly, at the tears on her temples and cheeks, daubing them wet and tender off her skin like a large and lazy cat, like a lion or something, but he's not a lion.

He's a hawk. He's an eagle.

He doesn't really know why he kisses and cleans the tears off her face like that, but he does, thinks he can, since this is the woman who bites his bones, scrapes her teeth over his pulse. He can do these things, she can, and he can stay here tonight, and forget about London -- Jesus, forget about London -- and Paris, too. And all his lies of omission, which are many, because they are the only lies he knows he can get away with.

And he is a selfish, cowardly man.

--

"No you don't," he whispers, falling to one side in the dark, curving his face to her neck, covering her with his arm, mutering softly: "You don't know anything,"

which they both know is a lie.