Superbowl Sunday

Fr. Echeverría

High Mass begins at eight o'clock in the morning on Sunday. Only the diehard Roman Catholic members of the congregation show up to that service and that's only because this church used to be a Roman Catholic situation. The Puerto Rican who has led the flock for the last year is an Anglican. The grandmothers and the widowers all thought about abandoning ship when Father Ojeda was promoted to Bishop and left them behind but it's been over a year now and very few people left when Father Echeverría took over.

The Awakened population of Denver doesn't need to know the history of this building or the man who's in charge of it. All they need to know is that by early afternoon the place is just about empty.

There was a wedding yesterday. Grains of rice and flower petals still cling to the sidewalk amidst the salt.

The doors are unlocked and the rector is in his office. Hard to tell where exactly he is because the same resonance that protected the Chantry for so long has cast itself over this place.

Connor

Not even an act of God could get Connor to go to high mass, or anything, that happens before the noon hour of any given day. It is not before noon, though, which gave Connor time to slowly, slowly, slowly come to consciousness and then slowly, slowly, slowly go about all the things he needs to do to get ready for his day. Do his business, brush his teeth, shower, check in with his business and see how it's doing, watch an episode of Adventure Time on Netflix.

You know, normal everyday things that everyone does, right? No, but they are the things that Connor does.

Finally, a 2013 Honda Civic hybrid, bright orange, pulls up outside the church on Federal. Pan had said people could drop in, right? Had mentioned this place? Connor pauses before he opens his door not to feel daunted or out of sorts at the idea of a former drug dealer going into a place of holiness and worship, but to marvel at the construction of the place. Snow is still piled thick on the lawn but the roads are clear and steaming where the sun hits any remaining snowmelt. Connor stops and stares up at the place, slackjawed and full of awe before finally he closes his mouth and swallows.

He goes inside and he has no clue whatsoever how to find Pan, so he tries the old fashioned way.

Cupping his hands round his mouth, he shouts, "YO! PADRE!"

Kalen Holliday

The church is like a blaze of all-seeing light. There have been other churches with Resonance for Kalen, and on most day he would have said that he preferred the slightly gentler ones. Today though, judgey-judgey light is vastly preferable to anything that could even be considered shadowy.

He moves slowly deeper into the church, between the limp and the lack of any hurry there are doubtless tortoises that are more speedy than Kalen right now. Somewhere inside, he should find Pan. If encounters the altar he does stop long enough to murmur a prayer before he continues looking for Pan.

And then he encounter's Connor. Or at least his voice. He shakes his head a little and heads back in that direction. Yelling will perhaps bring Pan. Or someone with directions to Pan. Either is acceptable.

Serafíne

There is no particular reason Sera decided to go to church on Sunday. She may not even precisely understand that it is in fact Sunday, the day Father Echeverría's God claimed for himself, out of all the others. Because he was tired or what the fuck ever, from birthing creation, like that is a big-ass deal.

Sunday though; superbowl Sunday. Even Pan's parishioners come to church in their team colors and the buzz after the morning services was bright and full and football football football.

The chilly Sunday afternoon finds her there, though. The low density neighborhood full of Pho places and taquerias, bars and liquor stores and churches too. All the things folks need to cope with the idea of time and its passing, the immediate and hereafter. Even though she may not particularly understand that it is Sunday, Serafíne looks as though she is dressed in her Sunday best. Chanel and Chanel and Chanel. A swinging white skirt - the weave loose enough that it is see through rather than solid - and a brilliantly textured jacket in hooded white brocade over a fishnet tee, over a black satin bra. High-heeled black peep-toe sandals, with white white heels carved into the shape of a bleached, branching coral, and glasses like a sunburst because nevermind that the sun is now only occasionally peaking out from behind scudding clouds, everything, everywhere feels far too bright.

Sera is walking in those shoes: from somewhere, god knows where, grains of rice and salt crystals crunching beneath her toes. She must be cold like that; and has indeed pulled her white hood up to mostly-cover her loose blond curls, but the hood and jacket can only do so much when the rest of her clothing is basically constructed from holes.

Sera runs her fingers along the fence framing in the church yard as she goes down the sidewalk. Pauses at the steps leading to the church proper, lilting her head back and taking in the shadow the place casts against the sky. Breathes in and wonders why she feels so fucking warm, considers the nature of wonder, then.

Understands, intellectually mind, that she may still be tripping just a little bit as she climbs the concrete steps to the church and opens the doors.

A stray thought makes her wonder when he hears confession.

That thought makes her smile rather indulgently to herself.

That rather indulgent smile is shattered when Connor shouts and Sera - behind both Kalen and Connor, winding rather than seeking - winces.

She may also be a little bit hung over.

Fr. Echeverría

The foyer of the church is bare hardwood that groans beneath the weight of foot traffic but does not buckle. Salt-stained carpet runners span the length of the hall as do cork boards with fliers and pictures tacked to them. As visitors glance around they can see evidence of past festivities and upcoming events.

The schedule for Narcotics Anonymous is prominently stapled to the corner of the board closest to the door. Both sides of the hall. Noon and six o'clock on Thursdays.

No way Pan did not hear Connor. His voice went tearing ass down the hall like a schoolboy unsupervised. Bounced off the empty space and carried itself as far as it could go. Sera knows Pan's office the last door down the left side of the hall. It's choked with books and shares a wall with reception.

They have about thirty seconds before the old man graces them with his presence. They can hear his shoes on the floor as he starts to walk towards them.

Connor

The young man with the dark skin and the mess of dark curls atop his head gives off a similar light to what is filling up this place, but it is dim, so dim in comparison his light gets swallowed up and lost. That is resonance. It would appear that nothing like that could diminish the bright light of his personal spirit. Connor moves with an energy that could almost be described as bouncing as he searches the foyer, poking his head into classrooms, even (very briefly) calling through a slight crack in the women's restroom dooor in a loud stage whisper, "Hey padre, you in there?"

Of course not, Connor.

Kalen and Serafíne enter the foyer and hear his next loud shout, "HEY YO PADRE WHERE ARE YOU??" echoing throughout the fellowship, where the services take place, swaggering through like he's not completely disrupting some old women knelt in prayer. Needless to say, they are not at all pleased by this shouting youngster.

Connor turns and as he turns he spies Kalen through the doors leading back out into the foyer (and a woman behind him, but hey it's Kalen so no one else exists for a moment). His face lights up in a bright warm smile at sight of the Hermetic. "Hey!" he says, still too loud and he takes off quickly for the door. Twists as he does to wave and offer an apologetic smile to the people he's disrupted. Then he's turning back, opening his arms wide, and clapping them around the Hermetic before he has a chance to even consider trying to amble out of range.

"Kalen, hey!"

Kalen Holliday

Anyone who thinks that Kalen dislikes hugs has fallen for one of his schemes. There are circumstances under which Kalen might have tried to dodge, but none of them are currently in effect. Particularly considering that Connor also feels like the opposite of horrifying madness shadows. He returns the hug one-armed, but he leans into it.

And there is Sera. Sera has not taken to greeting him with hugs, but that...that will be fine. He smiles and waves to Sera and absolutely does not call out to her.

"Some people," he says quietly, "Know that it is generally not desired to be yelling in a church. God has very good hearing. Prefers whispers. Or you could deafen him, or something." There is a trace of amusement and no real trace of censure. Exasperation, maybe. But Kalen is all enchanted by Connor, so there is no real sense of that being a real complaint.

Serafíne

"You don't have to shout," Sera, behind. Behind Connor, behind Kalen, behind her sunglasses. Her voice is rough with the night-before. That's the gravel in it; the lazy give-me-a-mimosa-or-something-so-I-can-face-the-day of it. She is still walking, though. She knows exactly where she is going. Her heels click precisely on the well-worn wooden floor and she slips past NA postings and scribbled invitations to the Veneration of the Holy Mother or the Winter Carnivale, the smaller, handwritten postings seeking employment or offering something for sale. Slips past them neatly and easily as if she belongs here, as if she belongs whereever she is, sauntering, see. Headed toward the office, or at least on an intercept course.

"His office is the last door on the left. If he's not there, you might find him at the rectory across the street. Downstairs, not up."

Today Sera's outfit cost more than the entirety of the take from the morning's collections at the church. Connor and then perhaps Kalen are reflected in the dark discs of her ridiculous and ridiculously expensive glasses. The hallway is dark enough to make them absurd but she doesn't care.

She likes the smell of furniture polish and floor wax and incense and old books.

She likes so many things, does Sera.

"And," ahead of them now, glancing back over her shoulder, the hood swayed, its shape distorted and distended by her glance back at the pair of them. An indulgent disagreement. "God likes everything in churches. Absolutely every fucking thing." She inhales, all sharp, and keeps walking, see - click click click.

"That's just the way she is."

Fr. Echeverría

Luckily the sanctuary is far enough back that anyone who was knelt in prayer would have a buffer of doors and space between them and the disruption even if they were still here. Even the most devout of them have things they have to do today. They have already lit their candles and gone home to their families or their volunteer responsibilities. Rosa isn't even still here.

The priest moves at a steady pace. Not hurrying or dragging ass. He knows they're all there. No surprises when he turns the corner.

He stands right in Sera's path but he does not block her way. If she really wanted to she could find a way around him.

As they must expect by now Pan is wearing black. His shoes are simple but shined and his slacks fit him and his short-sleeved button-down shirt is tucked in and belted. He's wearing suspenders but not a suit jacket. It's probably back in his office.

His black-gone-white hair has been combed into compliance but he hasn't shaved his face. His beard is trimmed. It suits him. Makes him look less gaunt.

"Everything alright?" he asks.

Connor

The quiet chiding from Kalen, the gravelly to-the-pointedness of Sera's You don't have to shout do not phase Connor in the slightest. To Kalen he only releases one arm and uses the other to practically crush him into his side. "Yeah but I'm looking for God today, I'm looking for a regular guy." Regular? Guy? Only Connor would describe Pan as such.

He looks at Sera and he watches her go down the hallway, and he grins at her correction of what God likes in churches.

And then there he is, the man himself, the one Connor came to see for a bit. His face lights up all over again and after a brief look at Kalen to make sure he's not about to yank away a support beam holding him up, Connor breaks free and closes the distance. He scoots around Sera and holds out his hand toward Pan, but if the priest thinks he's not getting a one-armed hug he is sorely mistaken. They're Awakened! At least he knows that Pan and Kalen are. And that makes them friends.

"Hey hey, I was looking for you," he says, just in case anyone here was left in doubt as to his purpose in the church today. He reaches for a handshake and, should he get it, goes in for that hug. And as he does he looks back over at Sera.

"Hey, I'm Connor." He doesn't know if she's part of Fight Club, too, so he doesn't finish up with any kind of declarations as to his state of magical awakening.

Kalen Holliday

Kalen is used enough to Connor's propensity to go scampering off that he is already pulling his weight off Connor when Pan comes into view. It's just like anticipating that your adorable golden retriever puppy is going to go chasing that rabbit that just sprung out of the bush and you need to be sure you have a firm hold on it's leash. You can't expect Connor to be still when you want him to. Sometimes he is. But he'll be still when he wants and nothing comes rushing out for him to chase.

He follows Connor at a slower pace. Despite her remarkable ability to walk in heels, Kalen isn't about to use Sera for stability. Pan is stable, but pretty much only God and Pan know how that would go. Kalen isn't sure he wants to find out. And so, despite the presence of perfectly serviceable walls and Connor's tendency to go flying off in other directions, he resumes leaning into Connor.

"I think everything is okay here." It's a guess. Connor seems okay. Sera doesn't seem anything much worse than hung over. No one is screaming, or bleeding, or missing. That he knows of.

Maybe he should call Grace.

Maybe he should calm the fuck down.

Serafíne

See, then Pan's in her way. Sera doesn't go around him, doesn't want to go around him. Her heels are a solid four inches, four and a half-inches hight but the priest still towers over her so there's a moment where she's looking back and looking up at him, her head tipped backwards, the hood caught up on the apex of the crown of her head. He is reflected in the dark discs of her sunglasses and she's smiling up at him both hung-over and still fucked-up, as if there were no one else in the room.

Her eyes catch and linger on the beard, though that is hard for anyone else to see except - perhaps - in the orientation of her face, the way her chin drops a bit, the way she cranes her neck to examine his not-quite-scruff anymore.

It suits him.

She likes it.

Some part of her wants to reach out and run her fingers through it, to feel it rough against his skin.

Pan asks if everything's okay Sera's brows draw together, a thoughtful pursing of her mouth: because yes everything's okay, everything's fine, everything's lovely, everything's golden, everything is incense-smoke and offerings-to-the-gods -

--

That's when Connor swoops in; beats her to the let's-hug-Pan punch, reaching out for a handshake and a one-armed hung.

Her eyes are all on Pan, even so. Her eyes are all on Pan at least until Connor speaks directly to her, and then she lifts her chin and swivels her attention to him, and he sees himself reflected, yes, twinned in the very dark glass of her sunburst sunglasses.

"Serafíne. Call me Sera. Connor of the free samples?"

--

- but there's a spark inside her. Those glasses turn to Kalen, as he limps up. Linger there, see. She's hidden behind them and her perusal of him is therefore entirely private. Withheld.

Then she turns back to Pan.

"Everything's fine." Which is true but also equivocal. Sera feels both fine and strange. She's also on drugs. Perhaps she always feels fine and strange. "I just wanted to see you. You're wearing suspenders."

Fr. Echeverría

Pan does not look like a man who is inclined to hug people. But then these young heretics don't know him very well. They know who he is and what he is capable of but they do not know him. They have not seen him in his element before. They are afraid to talk beliefs with him because why on earth would they do that. He's immovable. He's a mountain.

And yet he does not hesitate to help convert that handshake into a one-armed hug. He is warm and stronger than he looks and gives good hugs. Claps Connor on the back a couple times just before he releases him and then turns to give Sera a hug with two arms.

"Claro," he says to the presence of his suspenders.

Fuck it. Kalen you can have a hug too. When all the hugging and greeting and assurances that nothing has blown up or started running red with blood are over Pan puts his hands in his pockets and turns back to Connor who was looking for him.

"How can I help you?"

Connor

"Yes!" is Connor's reply when Sera asks if he's Connor of the Free Samples. That is what pulls him free of Pan's hug, but of course he can't get to Sera because now pan is hugging her (with two arms?? envy!). The apprentice of no affiliation is indeed a lot like a gold retriever of the puppy variety, in that he is young and golden-lit and has a tendancy to bounce from person to person to oo what is that! to person again.

"What'd you think?" he asks, like he needs Sera's criticism. He knows how Kalen liked it and it's been flying off shelves - but then, everything is flying off shelves in these first few glorious weeks of legalized marijuana distribution. So sometimes Connor isn't so sure if people are buying his product like they're on fire and it's the water that'll put it out because they enjoy it, or because it's there and available.

"I bred it to have more of the pleasant effects, the high, y'know? And less of the bad side effects, the paranoia and stuff." He is actually capable of going into a more scientific explanation, but in his line of work, Connor knows that 99.9% of people don't give two shits about the pH levels in the dirth and the compound structure of the fertilizer and the cross-breeding of the pollens.

Pan asks how he can help him and Connor just beams at him. "Not help, really. When I stopped by the house yesterday you weren't there and it looked like you were never there, so I thought I'd say hi and see how you're doing."

Kalen Holliday

Kalen understands that Pan has a congregation and that he hugs them. He knows that Pan hugs Sera. And he knows that Pan doesn't flinch away from contact. He still isn't expecting Pan to hug him.

Even so, aside from a little flicker of surprise in his pale eyes, you wouldn't know that. He doesn't stiffen or step back or any of the things people caught off guard about hugs will often do. He doesn't lean into Pan quite like he leaned into Connor, but he still does a little. There is, and you would have to be right on top of him or paying very close attention to notice, a little catch of breath that wasn't present when Connor hugged him.

Serafíne

DID SERA NOTICE THAT. Per + Awareness-as-empathy

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

Serafíne

Sera inhales when Pan hugs her and turns her head into his solid frame and closes her eyes behind the glasses. She feels all expectant, tipping her brow forward against his jaw, and something about the gesture - everything about the gesture - is remarkably and distinctly intimate. The frames of her glasses are cold metal where they ouch his skin.

It only lasts a second, then he is letting her go to include Kalen in the hugs and telling her of course he is wearing suspenders and Sera is reaching out like she's following tracers as he leans past her for more hugs, catching those suspenders between her thumb and forefinger. All, oh. hey. suspenders. She wants Pan to kiss her on the crown of her head or something as he ducks back but he doesn't and that's okay, too.

And she's watching him; and because she's watching him move she's watching Kalen too; and she observes the little catch of breath, the frame of it in her periphery, inhales it really, the way she inhales all things, pulls them into her, splits them asunder somewhere deep inside her body, beneath the hard line of her sternum. Perhaps Kalen will feel the edge of her hidden gaze on his profile, lingering, as Pan steps back and her hand drops from his fucking suspenders that she cannot seem to stop going on about and Connor is asking for a review of his product and Sera hardly hears him but she does hear him. Gives him this full-mouthed smile.

Her lips are painted red, such a goddamned red.

"Grace told me about them. I didn't actually get a chance to try. Haven't been out to the house for a while. I'm sure it's awesome, though."

Then Sera's in motion; leaning in to Pan and sliding her arms around his neck and lifting her mouth to his ear. Murmuring something to him and him only, before she peels herself away and slips beyond him, off in search of the lady's room.

Or the men's. Really, it is hard to say where she will end up.

Grace

[Nightmares!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 3, 4, 4, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace

[Perception+Awareness!]

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

Grace

When Kalen said that was going to go by la Iglesia del Buen Pastor, at first she declined the invitation to go with. Grace walking into a church would probably be grounds for instant smiting, or whatever it is that God does.

God kills infants. No, mass-slaughters infants. Because he's jealous. Anyone who actually reads the bible must come back with a few questions as to the actual goodness of the deity thus described within. Or they didn't read very closely. It reads at times like the book it must have really been -- a single desert tribe's vicious middle finger to the rest of the world -- their enemies. Our God is better than your God, ours will take the souls of your children!

To be honest, she's not so much afraid of God. More afraid of Pan, the wielder of God's power -- or at least he thinks he is. And there's the thing that gives a tick of guilty nervousness when she's around him. If he knew what she thought...

It reminds her of another conversation she had with Kalen. How she's too afraid of what people will think of her -- even people with the ability to call fire down from heaven.

Well, okay, fine. Maybe even going to the church on a Sunday like she's a goddamned believer... it might not be terrible. And if it does turn out to be crappy, it's all Kalen's fault anyway.

Her old red Toyota joins the new, glossy orange hybrid in the street outside when she becomes bombarded with the feeling of watchful, judgmental light. Pan. He bleeds into the bone of this place, doesn't he?

Trepidation is masked with a look and posture that says 'I'm cool'. Or maybe it comes across as 'I'm trying to be cool'. Either way, she pushes the door open, finds some of her favorite people in the world, and that mask melts into a genuine smile.

Fr. Echeverría

See: he catches that catch of breath when he hugs Kalen but he doesn't make anything of it. Hugging for his congregation is just something that happens. This is a house of worship and a house of gathering and a house of safety. They're in His house. They are not strangers.

So hugging happens and Pan doesn't interrogate Kalen when he stiffens.

Sera murmurs something in his ear and Pan keeps a hand on her upper back long enough to steer her in the general direction of the restrooms. Doesn't ask her what's wrong and doesn't fret after her. She is a Cultist and a grown woman besides and if she needed help she would have damned well asked for it.

And then here comes Grace.

This is weird, even for him.

"Miss Evans," he says. "Welcome."

Connor

Sera says she didn't try it but Grace told her about it and Connor gets this look on his face like she's just shattered his heart into a million, trillion pieces. She also presents a mystery. The weed he left was gone within a week, had to be replaced, and that replacement disappeared a bit more slowly. Someone is using it up and not telling him what they think about it, which is one thing, but who is it? And there is the mystery.

Which is forgotten when Sera leans up to murmur something to Pan. Connor turns to look over at Kalen. "So what're you doing here, anyway?" he asks, because it had been a bit of a surprise to find him here. "You coming to make sure the guy's not dead of a heart attack, too?" he asks, in that same stage-whisper he'd issued into the women's restroom. There is movement down the hall and Connor lifts his gaze to see Grace come into view. His expression pinches at the sight of her, brightens when he looks away to Pan again.

"Welp! I just wanted to make sure you weren't dead. I've got like six Super Bowl parties to hit before midnight so I better get a run on that." He claps his hand on Kalen's shoulder, gives it a friendly squeeze before he starts heading for the exit.

Kalen Holliday

His eyes roll at Connor's question about coming to see if Pan was dead. "Maybe I like churches. Stranger things have happened." But his expression softens a little at the hand on his shoulder, but all he says is, "Call me when you wake up in a ditch somewhere. I only kind of sleep."

He waves to Grace and then looks at Pan. "This hallway is starting to be like Oz." He does not try, hugs or not, leaning into Pan the same way he was leaning into Connor. There are walls, and he employs one for that purpose now.

Grace

Kalen's hugging Pan, and the priest turns to greet her with a 'Miss Evans'.

Oh if only she could go back in time and just introduce herself to everybody as 'K1llab33' or something equally stupid. It would be better than 'Miss Evans' any day of the week.

Miss Evans is what people call you when you're a child and you've done something wrong -- when they're appending the title out of irony. Remember your place, missy.

"It's just Grace," she says, but the smile stays. It might a bit harder to keep going, but it stays.

"Oh hey, Connor!" she says, as he makes his way out, oblivious to the pinchedness of his expression when he looks at her. "I just have to say, great product you have there. Helped me relax when I really needed it. Thanks."

Fr. Echeverría

Pan may never understand young people's insistence on being rude in social settings. They can keep right on correcting him when he prefixes their surnames with some sort of honorific. He didn't start calling Kalen by his first name until they reached the ball-busting stage of their relationship. Something about Kalen falling asleep on the couch while they were reading.

The crack about making her he's not dead of a heart attack rolls off his back. The way he does not react might imply he hadn't heard the comment. That is not accurate. Connor doesn't appear to have much of a filter.

"Good to see you again, Mister Whitman," he says as Connor starts hauling ass out of there.

And then there were three. The priest looks between Grace and Kalen and then indicates the intersection behind him with a tilt of his head.

"We can go into my office, if you'd like to have a seat."

Connor

Connor doesn't mind being called Mr. Whitman. There's a part of him that derives a perverse sort of pleasure out of it, because most people when they look at him would not say he looks like a Whitman. His father's father's name is a great means of weeding out the racists. A great part of him likes it because there's a poet of the same name and that's cool. He wrote something about paths in a wood and taking the less traveled road. Maybe that had an affect on Connor, the poem and the similarity in names. Who knows, really?

Most people would take Connor's comment about Pan dying of a heartattack as an offense. Hey we're not old, shut up, kid, that kind of thing. But even though Connor's only met the guy once before this he already knows he's cool. You should hear his jokes, they're hilarious! There was a genuine desire to make sure he was okay involved in coming to the church, and now that he knows he's alright he can go on to his first of half a dozen sports parties.

Grace calls out to him and he turns his head to give her a nod of greeting that turns into a narrow-eyed suspicious look. "Welcome," he says, and he continues on out the door, into his snowmelt-stained orange hybrid. It was so pretty when it was new just a little over a year ago, but he still likes it. The grime and grit is nothing a good wash can't clear off.

[and with that, Connor flees. thanks for the scene, yo!]

Kalen Holliday

Without Connor there to flop on and roll his eyes at, Kalen's expression settles back into a more familiar neutral one. He smiles for Grace though, real and warm, when she reaches them.

"I didn't think you were coming." Though, judging by the smile and the tone, he's glad that wasn't the case.

"That sounds good." Kalen says to Pan and starts in the direction of the intersection. He doesn't know precisely where he is going, but Sera gave a location and Pan indicated a direction. Even if they hadn't, it doesn't matter. In three steps they'll be ahead of him anyway.

Grace

Pan's reverted to calling her Miss, and Connor's giving her suspicious glares, and Grace wilts. Kalen, this is all your fault. "What was his problem? I mean, he said 'Welcome' like he was spitting out nails. Should I not have taken the free samples? He left a note!"

At least Kalen is here, one person who doesn't feel quite so distant and separate. And he sets her back to rights with the warmth in his gaze. He gets a smile back. "Well, you know... I need to get out more," she says back to him. Because 'getting out more' means going to church?

She follows them then then, off to the office. She was about to say something about how there are seats everywhere in this place, but maybe Pan means to discuss things that should be done in private. Like demons.

seeking.

Serafíne

There are nights when Sera breathes in smoke and breathes out fire. There are nights when she breathes in fire, and breathes out ash. There are nights she knows will happen before they ever do, and there are nights she will never remember. January is a month with an odd sort of clarity; new beginnings, and resolutions. She does not make resolutions of any sort and she never awakens early enough to wonder at dawn coming earlier, at the brightness of the sun in the sky, but sometimes (often) she sees dawn from the other side of the table. Quiet streets and garbage trucks and church buses. Food carts shut up tight, or opening for the day. Someone sweeping, someone hosing down salt stains from the last storm on the sidewalk.

Yesterday morning she spent a solid-she-does-not-know how long coming down from a long, strange trip in the seventh pew from the back of the Church of the Good Shepherd, considering whether or not she might like to have a conversation with the Virgin Mary. Offering up a different sort of prayer, that the good woman did not actually die a virgin. That she had some pleasure of her own in this life beyond answering the mumbled prayers of the devoted and the desperate. Waiting, and waiting, and waiting, a little bit breathless, for a spark she could feel like a seed inside her. Like an egg made of flame.

Mary was stubbornly quiet and Serafíne embraced a priest instead, murmured her wishes into his ear and peeled herself away then, and took herself home. Slept it off, well into the day and night.

Saturday was a bust. The acid hangover raw behind her throat and her eyes, the low dull ache of it a different sort of pleasure, and she allowed herself to lounge around the house in flannel pajamas, drinking toddies and toasting the sky and singing the complete album list of the Beatles' Revolver when she gave up on the group game of Settlers of Catan because she always fucking loses.

Sunday she wakes up in her morning which is everyone else's afternoon actually alone in her bed, tangled in a winding mound of sheets and blanket and comforter, and spends the next several hours drinking tea spiked with whiskey and doing Sunday things. Spreading out the newspaper and watching a quarter of a movie and padding around downstairs barefoot, in boxers and an old t-shirt, trying to decide whether she's going to take a fucking shower and go out tonight.

A bit surprised, then, when Dan asked her what the fuck, wasn't she going to get ready, didn't she remember that they had a show.

No. No, she didn't remember.

--

Two hours later they're setting up at the Buffalo. The crowd's small; Sera wouldn't let her friends tell anyone about this. Didn't tell anyone herself; didn't want to. She hasn't played out since she was infected and kidnapped and yeah she sang some fucking Christmas carols during her Christmas party but that's not the same. That's not the same at all.

The air tastes like ozone and whiskey and Sera has a bottle of tequila in hand while Dan's running connections for all their fucking amps, and the room feels strange - golden but fraught. She wants to ask Dan if he has any more of that acid. She does ask Dan if he has any more of that acid and he does and he doesn't want to hand it over but he always does what she asks so he hands it over and she kisses him.

They play for an hour. She floats down off the stage. It feels like is lasted for no more than one brief seizure of her heart.

Serafíne

Stamina

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

Serafíne

Perception + Awareness

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 6, 7, 7, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )

katabasis

It lasted no longer than one brief seizure of her heart. Her body aches all over, Serafíne, her skin prickles, or to be more accurate, the air prickles against her skin, as if it is counting each hair on her arm, each skin-cell, each flutter of her pulse, as if the air - the sweat-soaked air, the metallic ozone air - would put a wet mouth beside the hollow of her throat, above the clavicle, and inhale her, scrubbing her skin away like peeling an almond, revealing what is naked and true beneath what is unabashed in its bitterness or its sweetness or its hard edged silk on the tongue. It lasted no longer than one brief seizure of her heart and as she sang, as she played, as she sang and played with her band, the lights smeared like a god was finger-painting with them leaving finger-prints all through the light thick ridges where the light rippled over into darkness and the faces of people watching except for right there where the smearing of lights like a banquet of candles and how sweet the candle-smoke curls on Sera's tongue when she hits a low note that vibrates in her belly sends her hips singing how sweet the candle-smoke does curl vanilla and bitter-sea salt but no go back do the faces of the people watching finger-painted too smeared along with the light and the colors except for right there where the smattering of lights like a banquet of candles is and

Serafíne is watched and can see herself watched by a wild-haired woman with unblinking eyes, a scrawny, knock-boned woman, her hair a shamble of elf-locks and her eyes the angry bruised flint eyes of someone who is often angry bruised flint-y, of someone who remembers wildness in her bones and gives herself to it often lets it give itself to her that wildness that no creature may know and not long for, and she does not look injured, this watching woman fixated on Serafíne, but it is right and proper or at least it is that there is a pulping of bruise-purpled grapes all over her shoulder smeared past the drape-open of a tank and one breast and one hard nipple and

Serafíne, when she sings a high note, can see the woman blotted out by the banquet of candles, candles that are just lights smearing, gods finger-painting, candles that are not candles, that are just an interplay of shadow and light and song and

Serafíne can feel her heart beating, each beat distinct, like a clear cry, like a greeting,

where are you?

why, for this, have you forsaken me?

katabasis

ooc: grump! should be:

Serafíne, when she floats down from the stage, can feel her heart beating, each beat distinct, like a somebody else's clear cry, like a greeting, a wail,

where are you?

why, for this, have you forsaken me?

Serafíne

Everything's familiar. Everything comes back. Hardly matters that is has been months and months she was on the stage, with the neck of a bottle of booze occasionally in hand and a guitar mostly across her back except when she remembers that she likes to play it, to feel the strings beneath the pads of her fingers and the hard striking immediacy of the frets against her hand. Her friends are behind her and there's a sort of communion; it hardly matters when she fucks things up because they follow her the way rats and cats and children follow a piper, piping.

Hardly a crowd, not even a crowd, just some lucky bastards who decided to go drink on a Sunday night because they cannot imagine why they might want to see the morrow come; because the beginning of the week sets off that panicked need to put it off again, for five minutes, or ten. Because: time moves for then, as it does.

She doesn't remember taking the acid after all but her mouth is dry and the night is clipping itself into compact little sense memories, the sort that feel hard, distinct, faceted, and melt like myrrh on the back of her tongue: bitter.

sweet.

The bottle's still in hand. She has this grace when she hops down from the little stage and no one in the band ever expects her to help break down their gear and the patrons are turning back to their conversations, ears still ringing from the last crunching cord and Sera's searching through the deliciously smearing lights the faces like thumbprints, mouths open, passing and they come and go, it seems, like light, both particles and waves, and she catalogues and registers and disregards them each in a breath because there's just one person here she wants to find.

A woman at the bar; with wild eyes and wild hair. A smear of light.The thumbprint of the gods.

If Sera finds her, she knows that she will kiss her. Open mouthed and without regret.

I'm right here.

I'm always here.

I'm looking for you.

sometimes.

sometimes.

Serafíne

Perception + Awareness

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 2, 4, 6, 6, 6) ( success x 3 )

katabasis

[Mysteries]

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

katabasis

Dan says something to her, so does a man by the bar, an admirer, steeled himself up to say a word. Serafíne can hear the word but when and if she looks at the man if her eyes glance past him stone-skip they're all water under the surface reflective if she looks at the man the word looks like a leaf wind-blown storm-wet something thick and edged and tropical something from a place where the earth is black muddy like coffee grounds and the next word he says is another wind-blown storm-wet leaf which gets caught on his chin until he wipes it off or lifts his glass to his mouth to take a drink and Serafíne seeks and she can feel the woman although she cannot feel the woman as she might feel another Will-worker she just feels the woman can sense her now that she is trying, sense her like a thin sharp thread knotted under the first joint of her thumb (or is it the second? count in, count out?), like the twist of that twine and a tug, like filaments gleaming, and follow find does feeling the woman mean that Serafíne finds her?

First she follows, or seeks, all the way to the emergency exit where the woman's shadow seemed to spin but no it was just the shape of the woman's hair and her shoulder spun out've shadow and more lights smeared and there on the ground if Serafíne is sharp there on the ground the Ecstatic can see a broken shell out of place dinge-y un-illumined because the ground is not well-loved by light and there is water drooling from the shell gleaming from its space it is cool on her thumb if she picks it up spills across her knuckles and the shell is real she might show it to someone and they will say weird you found that where and it smells like the sea it smells like a woman it smells like the presentiment of a change and that close to the door Serafíne notices how it thuds in its frame as winds beat at it from outside trying to get in

let me in, let me in, let me in always, you are always looking away, baby, let me in

and the woman, there she is: Serafíne finds her after a particularly loud shudder-sound from the door

Their eyes meet across an eddy of emptiness in the center of the bar-club-whatever just in front of the stage; somehow the woman has made it along the edge of the space like a jackal-thing, like a shadow-thing, and she is now leaning near the tangle of wires, equipment not put away yet just waiting in silence the equipment not the woman, there is something so angry about the woman's eyes that she cannot be a quiet presence and

if Serafíne comes on the woman looks away sharply, a human gesture because what else could she be; fire-light skims across her collar-bone and shoulder, then stays there on the surface of her like a mirage like a trick like oil on water like fire is a silk and

if Serafíne kisses the woman, open-mouthed and without regret, the woman speaks a word just before which is so scornful and so loving and it is not a storm-wet leaf to rub off the chin or to accidentally swallow;

it is lightning, a fork of it, a shiver-flicker of it;

why, querida, are you always here?

Serafíne

stamina!

Dice: 3 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 5) ( fail )

Serafíne

Oh,

the man the stranger the loved-one, oh, she remembers him, sees him and cannot see him and smiles for the way his words move out of his mouth. Smiles and feels the way her mouth sharpens with the expression, the way her lips move across her teeth. The way it changes the shape of the breath she's exhaling, would be exhaling to tell the man and stranger something, something - not tonight, or I fucking love that shirt or tequila? or kiss me or

I don't know your name, but I remember you.

--

The sharp tug of the thread knotted around a thumb-joint. Why does it pull precisely against three particular fibers of her particular heart? Why does that make tears spring so easily to her eyes. Sera who is Sera who is Sera circles that thumb with the forefinger and thumb of her opposite hand and licks her lips licks salt from her lips and remembers the sea.

Picks up the shell, yes, broken, yes, and spills salt water across her fingers and inhales the myriad scents that come with that cool water and turns, listening to that voice, calling, and pivots to rest her spine against the shuddering door, beaten by the wind so that it rattles in wind. Bone shoulders and clavicles, wingrooted, flat hands and her heart in her throat,

sometimes it hurts to look. I -

and there, there half-way across the bar, where the stage bleeds into shadow or shadow bleeds into the stage, framed against a papered over backdrop of old flyers and posters and ads and setlists scrawled with the signatures of all who have come before. She has eyes for no one but the woman and laughs, delicious,

delighted,

when she is found. When she looks away like that, firelight cutting warm to burnish her sharpest bones and deepen her darkest shadows and kisses her, of course, nevermind that it scorches, electric, humming copper on her tongue,

I remember you. hushed and shot-through with wonder like wire, live. I don't remember you. this is where I live. where else could I be?

katabasis

This is what others see: Serafíne, dropping to the ground; shaking, gripped as if by a seizure -

- and the floor is hard and wet and there is a noise like a moth trapped against a light

going up in flames.

--

But that is not what Serafíne sees and that is not what Serafíne feels. There is no floor tacky with the accumulated layers of half-assed cleaning, there is no risk of biting her tongue off, no cyclone moving through her bones, no tremors, no --

That is almost a lie because Serafíne has inhaled the lightning-word the burning of it has sent it forking back and her lungs feel as if they are blistering, but it is a good blistering, it is that poignant chord of surpassing sweetness, the next level beyond sweetness, something that is beyond pain and beyond pleasure, understand, and what Serafíne also knows is

that the woman is still looking at Serafíne with those anger-bruised eyes, and her fingers are clawed, are flesh-clawing, could tear-through-flesh, and she draws back ( -- have her features changed? They have, subtly: become something younger, one moment; older, the next), draws Serafíne back-in-her-wake, and says

i want to shake your bones out of your flesh you silly girl(beloved child)i want to tear your face off(i want the wind, do you understand?)this is where [else?] you live?

while the air is dying different colors by storm-light and the sky is in fact a sky now something with a sheet of clouds purpled and silvered and blued (blewed? blow,) and blacked light held captive behind the clouds and the occasional calligraphic streak of lightning. They are standing on a pebble-caked sea-shore and surrounded by scrub by sparsity a hill with a perilous path a small hut a small coracle on the waves, cracking open like an egg, and there is a gate by the stones by the cliff by the path that goes up the hill and beyond the gate there are interesting shapes but it is dark. Serafíne's hair is wild.

What wouldn't you do for the answer?

Serafíne

I like my bones,

Sera returns, laughing, fucking exultant, to find herself in so changed and charged a place. Her voice is like a shout beneath her skin and she feels it vibrating, vibrant, violent, and she feels like it like the memory of a scream, the furious battering of bruised fists against a barred and locked door.

I like my flesh.

She feels that bright spark inhaled like a fireseed inside her, deep. In her spine, shielded by her ribs, this bright high centerpoint that makes her pull her shoulders back sharply. She does not understand that she is on the floor, convulsing, that someone thinks it is just those fucking shoes she wears, that she tripped on the cords but then no, a shout and Dan, of course Dan is cursing volubly, dropping the laptop he was wrapping up and packing back into its bag as he crosses the stage and jumps off and tells strangers to back off and sinks to his haunches and has no idea what to do.

they serve me well. you. you keep changing. you keep

- a tightness she finds beneath the root of her tongue, a knot drawn taut by a skilled sailor's hand. She does not understand that because she is here, she is Elsewhere. She is on the shore and the storm that is on her tongue and raw in the back of her throat and tangled beneath her skin and bright and wild in her hair is churning all around them.

but I'd do anything and she's turning, pivoting on the balls of her feet, feeling the tide churn around her toes, taking in the path and the gate and the coracle churning on the waves and the bruised sky-at-twilight and the place where she also lives. I'd do everything.

there is a path and there is a hill and there is a hut and there is a girl, climbing the hill and she may begin her climb in the perilous path but she is not one for following the way-laid-out, even if she intends to find that shelter and open that door and climb those stones and devour those clouds and eat that lightning, consume it until her belly-is-full,

so she begins on the path. strays into the scrub - climbing, climbing, still.

Serafíne

no italics!

Serafíne

I like my bones,

Sera returns, laughing, fucking exultant, to find herself in so changed and charged a place. Her voice is like a shout beneath her skin and she feels it vibrating, vibrant, violent, and she feels like it like the memory of a scream, the furious battering of bruised fists against a barred and locked door.

I like my flesh.

She feels that bright spark inhaled like a fireseed inside her, deep. In her spine, shielded by her ribs, this bright high centerpoint that makes her pull her shoulders back sharply. She does not understand that she is on the floor, convulsing, that someone thinks it is just those fucking shoes she wears, that she tripped on the cords but then no, a shout and Dan, of course Dan is cursing volubly, dropping the laptop he was wrapping up and packing back into its bag as he crosses the stage and jumps off and tells strangers to back off and sinks to his haunches and has no idea what to do.

they serve me well. you. you keep changing. you keep

- a tightness she finds beneath the root of her tongue, a knot drawn taut by a skilled sailor's hand. She does not understand that because she is here, she is Elsewhere. She is on the shore and the storm that is on her tongue and raw in the back of her throat and tangled beneath her skin and bright and wild in her hair is churning all around them.

but I'd do anything and she's turning, pivoting on the balls of her feet, feeling the tide churn around her toes, taking in the path and the gate and the coracle churning on the waves and the bruised sky-at-twilight and the place where she also lives. I'd do everything.

there is a path and there is a hill and there is a hut and there is a girl, climbing the hill and she may begin her climb in the perilous path but she is not one for following the way-laid-out, even if she intends to find that shelter and open that door and climb those stones and devour those clouds and eat that lightning, consume it until her belly-is-full,

so she begins on the path. strays into the scrub - climbing, climbing, still.

katabasis

and so she begins on the path, and so she strays into the scrub - climbing, climbing toward the Heavens. The woman does not come with her. The woman curled her lip like a leopard and turned away, again; turned away, with such sharpness, from Serafíne's pivot - although Serafíne will remember, as she climbs, or maybe it is a future!Serafíne remembering, maybe it is a younger (forgotten) Serafíne remembering, looking through this moment to that moment which is the same as this moment because all moments are happening now, Now is the only moment, the point is Serafíne will remember it as if the woman had whipped out a sinewy hand to curl around Serafíne's wrist and had hauled her close to bump foreheads. Turn like a dancer. That fire-sheen licks from the woman's skin to Seraíne's and it burns her so but once again there is a place beyond pleasure and a place beyond pain and there is no word for it in any language Serafíne knows and

there is a path, which Serafíne begins up, and the woman is no longer there. Gone. The steep slant and the prickles are unforgiving, once Serafíne leaves the path, unforgiving and, just behind her, she can feel it in one of her shoulder-blades, the lightning strikes sand and water where she'd just been standing, it follows her footsteps, one, two, three, four, sea-glass in the sand, sea-glass in the dirt, sea-glass in the stone, and

there is a grave stone. Serafíne knows it is a grave stone, an old, worn-out grave stone, because she trips over it, because it has the look of a grave stone although to read the name on it she would have to clean it. There are a couple of bottles, of offerings: an empty tequila bottle, an abalone shell, a braided bracelet, a blunt. There are more grave stones, some less weathered, dotting the hill, and although the storm rages around her, although it is loud, loud, loud

there is this pregnant silence between thunder-words; the air is full with child;

the air watches her, and the lightning limns goat-eyes in the dark, and then there is a little circle of stones, of fairy stones, over-that-a-way, and then over that a-way there is a photograph, a sound under the storm, a jangle-sound, nerve-jangle sound, a metal-against-metal sound, like a handful of coins or bells, faint as a butterfly kiss of lashes sweep

and over that-a-way, further up, there is a dark dark wood, all a-snarl

Serafíne

(Elsewhere, people are trying to hold her down and there are a half-dozen different theories about what should be done right now to help her. Hold her arms and legs down; or don't. Let her body flail itself in the throes of that wildness. What if she chokes; on her own tongue, or her own vomit, or her own anything. It's a goddamned bar. People are drunk. There is more than one call to 911 and more than one person trying to google what to do about a seizure and blood everywhere, Jesus, head wounds. Dan is cursing quietly and his hands are not shaking though he has the conviction that they are; Dee has followed him around and they are both trying to hold her now and a few other people too, from the bar, in the audience, but first Dee's hands cool and white on his shoulders, her breasts against his shoulders as she bent over him to ask, rhetorical see, worried too - what the fuck did she take? - right into his ear.)

Breathless and wanting; isn't that how she feels all the time. Not this betrayal of her body, no - no the air hunger, not the terrible pounding of her heart, in her chest and in her head, in her ears and at her throat, not this awful physical betrayal (not recently, mind. not for weeks and weeks, at the least) but metaphorically, at the least.

So she runs; so she starts to run and finds pieces of her body starting to betray her even as her darting hands and nimble little feet find purchase on the steep and crumbling slope. Thighs like water, arms like lead, breathes in these deep and ravaging heaves and cannot get clear.

Falls and curses herself for falling and starts to crawl or something when the scrub just seems to shiver and that scent fills her eyes and her mouth, fills her nose entirely; she breathes it full and brackish and salt-laden and pushes herself up until her elbows are locked, arching her body through the upper third of her spine, shoulders forward, bleeding palms flat and open on the slanted, mud-laced rock. Her knuckles are scraped and blunted, swollen and bleeding.

Staring at the shell of the mask, but looking slant-wise, see -

at the reflection of the lightning in the shallow pool of rainwater, the inverse shadow of the eyes and nose and mouth.

I would've thought there'd be a fucking party inside me.

- says Sera, then. She is already reaching for the mask.

Studio fuckin' 54, man.

Lifting it up over her head. Pouring the rainwater over her brow like baptism, before fitting the mask to her face and breathing: in and in and in.

Serafíne

WP

Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

katabasis

If Serafíne fits the mask to her face from a horizontal angle -- that is to say, she lifts it up over her head; the water, cold, 'plashes on her brow, on her nose, on her lip, perhaps she breathes some of it in, can still feel her ribs straining, her body wearying; and then she lowers the mask and fits it like putting in a puzzle piece, then there is a moment of disorientation (visceral [gut]) -- something caught in her eye-lashes -- or perhaps the moment that the silence descends and hits; and then through the mask's eyeholes she sees a changed world, and

If Serafíne lowers the mask on her face from above, lets it follow the rain-water path, baptismal, washed clean -- that is to say, she closes her eyes for a moment (or doesn't), lets the mask's chin bump against the bridge of her nose or glide above it, continue downward, over her mouth, over her own chin; if for a moment, she is in the mask's shadow, its total darkness; if all that, there is a moment -- a wind-swept moment where it is a whole-body clap, the silence descendant and bam; and then through the mask's eyelashes she sees a changed world, and

and the water on her face, tear-tracks, blood-tracks (her fingers and nails worn down, worn down), rain-water, mask-fount water, it: adheres

to the cool and dark and safe safe (safe?) interior of the mask

and the mask is her face. It is still the mask. But it is her face, completely covering her mouth with a mask-mouth, only nose-holes to breathe by, only those eye-holes no longer dark but colored in Serafíne, through those eye-holes she can see:

The dark wood is still a snarl above, but through the trees there is a sprawl of a building, something with carnival colour -- people, laughing, the apex of the hill. Festival lights in the gloom, where there is a crack in the storm or it doesn't matter quite so much. It is not so far away, though she aches.

The grave stones, two scraped half-clean, half-revealed, are still to her back: the wild hill, the paths, the mausoleums, the shanty shack, the unlit candles.

The wild, wild sea -- the sea-glass footsteps.

Movement she sees also: something processional, in her perepheral. The mask has a certain desire to undo anything that should not see what there is to see. That desire curls like a fern ready to unfurl: taut, tautening -- ready to spring.

Serafíne

It is hard to say how she puts the mask on; Serafíne is not much given to the wearing-of-masks. Oh, costumes, sure. Elf or angel or what the fuck ever: vamp-hooker-manic-pixie-not-dream-girl. None of the above; but not masks. She does not wear them well.

This one, though. Because it is there when she is failing and there's got to be a reason for that; because of the silence and the rain and the wind; because of the water accumulating in its bowl because of the beating of her heart, because of the promise of the

clamourous wail

all around her, god knows.

So she puts on the mask; does it imperfectly. Fits it over her face, eyes closed until it sinks solidly against her, then breathes in sharply, pushing herself to stand, reaching up to slide her hands over the mask-face. To feel the mask-mouth and the mask-nose, to see the shadow of her fingers over the mask-eyes. Turns in a slow-circuit to take in: the hill and the wood and wind and the wild sea. The half-cleansed graves and the unkindled candles. Feels the curling tendril of something beneath; in the mask-skin, the infection of it in her shoulders and spine.

is the lightning mine

yours/ours?

Another lingering glance back down the hill toward the graves, as she opens her mind to the people above, and her eyes to the movement in her periphery.

Serafíne

arete

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

katabasis

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

Serafíne

Perception plus awareness as empathy

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 4 )

katabasis

Serafíne opens her mind and -- no. Her mind gets tangled up in the mask. Her mind gets tangled up in her own skin. It is a curious feeling, that density; that sudden lack. There is Nothing, for a moment. There is Nothingness, the answer to the question: what came first, the chicken or the egg; the answer that some people find. It is not cold. It is only Nothing; and then it is her mind again, outside the confines of the mask which are not confines at all, because it Serafíne's face, stiff and smells-so-good and not-quite-used with ribbons when and if she lifts her hand next, fat ribbons and horse-hair braids falling, falling. Her mind again, open to the people above: the rowdy, reverent clot of them; they are celebrating; they are in celebration, although she is still removed from the crowd, and at her periphery:

there is the woman again. The woman from the bar, the wild-haired woman, although she has changed. Now she is wearing bangles, some rubber bright color rainbow, some copper, verdigris, older than old, some resinous, glass-caught. She is not near. She is beyond the processional --

it is a processional

-- she is a shadow, see, against the storm, briefly leaping to light and color and a sharpness, and she says very clearly (and as she speaks, perhaps Serafíne's eyes meet hers; and if they do, oh, then she sees a certain compassion, a certain wild - restrained - unrestrained will, ferociously compassed by love),

Find my altar, querida; find my altar, and do what comes naturally, then you can tell me.

She stays very still until Serafíne moves again, and then: the woman, the shadow, the collection of color, she whirls away; it is fire-grace, see; it is fire-grace, storm-eaten, and

the peripheral. The processional. The procession. The parade. No: it is somewhat solemn, although the young men and women: some she recognizes, some she does not; one, she knows in her heart matches one of those graves; some of them are masked, some of them are not. There is one woman whose face has been clawed away, skin scraped away, scraped clean and clear, but she does not seem distressed: she is smiling, faintly. They are all smiling faintly, holding branches of iron, holding little votive lanterns, some with fire, most without.

Serafíne

nothing. Nothing and nothing and nOthing solid; made as such and she finds that so remarkably frustrating, doesn't she, impatient creature that she is, used to having everything she wants when she wants it; used to wanting what she has, now, immediately before her. Used to wanting and being wanted; the insidious and delicious dance of it.

And then; oh, the tangle dissolves or something Christ there are things for which she lacks words and things for which words lack meaning. But she can feel the revelry above her and it baths the back of her mouth and glides sweet down her spine; a certain pull of that knowledge pools somewhere in her belly and she feels also the wind and remembers the graves and closes her girl-eyes behind the mask-eyes and sees Her. Directly; the wild eyes and open, the challenge of her mouth like a snarl, the stars behind her tongue, the storms behind her eyes.

Well,

well -

Sera turns and says goodbye to the graves. Says it with her heart in her throat and her fist over her sternum, she will come back, she will remember. Someday she will remember them all, but not today.

That knowledge like a knot tied into the tissues of her throat; her tears falling and drying on the mask-cheeks painting like a drifting sunset behind a falling star;

and then she starts upwards again, though this time on a slanting path that moves at nearly cross-purposes with the hill. A slanting path meant to intersect the procession of strangers, with their half-lit lanterns and their clawed off faces, all of it. Her path is meant to intersect with theirs, slightly ahead of theirs to be fair - out in front, out in front, out in front, because she was not meant to follow them, was she?

Serafíne

Perception and ze awareness!

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 2, 5, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Serafíne

stamina!

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

Serafíne

dex + athletics

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

katabasis

and Serafíne is quick when she cuts across the hill and she can feel that the elevation is different that moment when one goes from low to high altitudes that liminal moment where there is a transition an adjustment she can feel it hanging in the air like a note of music like maybe those bells she heard earlier are still there (of course they are [that faint shiver of a sound]), lingering, not frozen, but forever fixed and mutable, and that is what Serafíne can feel when she cuts across the hill to take a place [or her place] at the head of the procession

and now she is there.

Now she is there, in the front, a straggle line of strangers behind her, and she can feel the air change again, this time because of a swift-moving, weather-shift of emotion from the people in the procession, she can hear their footsteps slow, accomodate, and wait, yes, waiting, because now she is in the front, now she is in the front, and she is leading, and what do they do now?

Nearest to her is a dark-skinned man in jeans and sandals and a leopard skin holding one of the unlit lanterns and a girl she knew once but does not know anymore (who might've had blushes like strawberries smeared across cream speckles of it stains like a berry dressed) wearing many skirts, instead of sandals, no shoes at all, a very very tall woman in a mask similar to her own but with no eyes behind, though her bare skin is clearly living, breathing, dark mask-sockets watchful holding one of those iron branches, and then a Dionysian man with heavy-lidded eyes and a beard and a sensuous mouth, also wearing a skirt or a wrap, and if she looks back to look along those strangers, a lion cub ambling, a spill of rosary over hands, an iguana trying to hurry past the lion cub

and before her, looking ahead, she can see stone steps (or glass-steps? lightning-struck?), weaving unsteadily through bracket and around the hill toward a drop of cliffs, a certain knot of darkness

something in the dark, something that is unlit

Serafíne

Strange how the air changes and the earth changes and the voice changes; strange how the ears pop. Strange how the lungs burn, just a little more breathless. She is already breathless but nimble, picks her way slantwise across those slopes to take the lead and turns with her mask and her Sera-eyes, her bloodied hands and her scratched and bleeding legs and her tense shoulders and her need,

her need,

her need,

glances back down the the line of worshippers or pilgrims or supplicants and smiles a strange smile, all savage and sad, behind the mask-mouth.

Sera breathes in deep, then. Deeper, braces herself and her shoulders and launches herself, as she does, spiraling upwards and into the dark. Those lightning fused steps, all dark and glimmerglass, carved into the side of the mountain or cut obsidian; she starts to climb, fast as she can, both hand over hand and foot over foot. Some part of human-her recalls the first time she rapelled down the side of a cliff somewhere in the fucking Alps. She was already a little bit stoned and then: freefall. How her lungs sang.

Up and up and up, past the here and into the dark; into the darkness where even perhaps her eyes cannot see, where there is something,

unlit.

As she reaches up into the darkness, she reaches too for the mask - to take it off. Sera needs her mouth now; or so she thinks and if the mask will be removed, she removes the mask. Unlaces the ribbons and then laces them again, holding the mask loosely woven around the slender width of her palm.

Climbs until she finds the place where things are unlit; swallows hard and feels: the seed, the seed, the firespark. The burning beyond pain and beyond pleasure. The kiss of her mouth on brow, the scorched blow-back of a shared breath. Sera kneels and leans forward and braces herself with her hands if there is some Thing upon which to brace herself,

and breathes out,

fireseed,

burning.

katabasis

Her path is not an easy one. Those steps have edges. They might cut her palm: her already injured hands. They might be too slippery there, too glossy; they might obscure depth, sudden concave patches. Her path is not an easy one. The air pressure changes and, through some trick, around this corner there is a place where the roar of the sea is nothing, it is as the thread of her own pulse, and then come out've that corner and it is suddenly all sound again -- all madness: too much; the mountainside trembles and to fall would be a very great adventure but not the kind of adventure one comes back from. The path dips lower, suddenly: lower, narrowing so that it is barely wide enough for two of her feet, but Serafíne toddles around on ridiculous shoes, she can balance on a ledge. The path goes under stone and then sea-spray hits her toes.

Behind her, the procession. They come on and they come on, following her even as she races when she can race, runs when she can run, climbs as quickly as she can with no heed to grace. Behind her, there is a shouted laugh once, swallowed up by the air and the wind like a gull's cry -- or an ember. Another laugh, once; and then, for an instant, a low buzzing, as of a half-begun chant that five of them decided to at once enter into, then let un-lace.

And then they are at the dark.

The dense knot of unlight.

It is a cave. More accurately: it is a hollow in the cliff-side, across a handswidth-wide strip of stone. The cave has been made into a room and, when Serafíne in the dark goes into the dark and becomes Serafíne in the dark, she finds a stone -- altar (just so), a stone table, a stone something -- with her hands, that she can brace herself against. The altar (table?) has a hollow, too; has edges she can feel, and niches, and smells of oil, candle-oil, of things once burnt.

Serafíne kneels; swallows hard; feels: the seed, the seed, the firespark,

and she breathes out.

As she breathes, the top of that table moves under her palm: the sound of a passage opening. Lightning comes, storm-light to illuminate Her altar. There is meaningless grafitti on it, and cracked-bones, oracle bones, and in the hollow at the center of it, things burned once now-ash, and above there is hanging lichen and flowers and green among all the stone, and beyond the table-altar there is a man-made arch of a stone that does not come from that cave. More niches for lanterns and candles. At the center of it, emptiness where something was but is not now, a crack from some earthquake -- or maybe the lightning found its way here.

And Serafíne has time to see all this; to look around at all this; to touch it with her hands.

Time to do all that, before

won't we see?

katabasis

Her path is not an easy one. Those steps have edges. They might cut her palm: her already injured hands. They might be too slippery there, too glossy; they might obscure depth, sudden concave patches. Her path is not an easy one. The air pressure changes and, through some trick, around this corner there is a place where the roar of the sea is nothing, it is as the thread of her own pulse, and then come out've that corner and it is suddenly all sound again -- all madness: too much; the mountainside trembles and to fall would be a very great adventure but not the kind of adventure one comes back from. The path dips lower, suddenly: lower, narrowing so that it is barely wide enough for two of her feet, but Serafíne toddles around on ridiculous shoes, she can balance on a ledge. The path goes under stone and then sea-spray hits her toes.
Behind her, the procession. They come on and they come on, following her even as she races when she can race, runs when she can run, climbs as quickly as she can with no heed to grace. Behind her, there is a shouted laugh once, swallowed up by the air and the wind like a gull's cry -- or an ember. Another laugh, once; and then, for an instant, a low buzzing, as of a half-begun chant that five of them decided to at once enter into, then let un-lace.

And then they are at the dark.

The dense knot of unlight.

It is a cave. More accurately: it is a hollow in the cliff-side, across a handswidth-wide strip of stone. The cave has been made into a room by -- Someone, once. Someones, perhaps. When Serafíne reaches up to take off the mask, it is difficult: it has fused to her skin, with her skin, by virtue of the salt of her tears, the iron of her bloody fingerprints; it has taken her face, and left her her girl eyes. But it is just a mask; it is just skin; just physicality; and when Serafíne peels off the painted clouds and fall of night the gilt-brushed coils of hair the pretty mobile mouth it leaves her with a sound like an open mouthed kiss;

and its ribbons are warm around her wrist;

it does not crumble away. It is still a mask, although the contours of its face are more familiar now: the emptiness of its eyes, familiar.And, when Serafíne in the dark goes into the dark and becomes Serafíne in the dark, she finds a stone -- altar (just so), a stone table, a stone something -- with her hands, that she can brace herself against. The altar (table?) has a hollow, too; has edges she can feel, and niches, and smells of oil, candle-oil, of things once burnt.

Serafíne kneels; swallows hard; feels: the seed, the seed, the firespark,and she breathes out.

As she breathes, the top of that table moves under her palm: the sound of a passage opening.

As she breathes, lightning comes, storm-light to illuminate Her altar.

There is meaningless grafitti on it, and cracked-bones, oracle bones, and in the hollow at the center of it, things burned once now-ash, and above there is hanging lichen and flowers and green among all the stone, and beyond the table-altar there is a man-made arch of a stone that does not come from that cave. More niches for lanterns and candles. At the center of it, emptiness where something was but is not now, a crack from some earthquake -- or maybe the lightning found its way here.

And Serafíne has time to see all this; to look around at all this; to touch it with her hands.

Time to do all that, before

won't we see?

Serafíne

Serafíne keeps hold of the mask; the ribbons warm around her wrist. The sunlit mouth, the starlit, twilight eyes. The emptiness behind them except when she chooses to fill it. Sera keeps the mask-ribbons around her wrist, fingers all coiled up with them, the skin of the mask breathing-warm and drifting somewhere around the level of her thigh. Skimming past her hip as she catches up the ribbons and pulls it from from its dangle so it will not be cracked against the rock as she starts to explore the darkness of the cave that is her altar. Her altar.

Sera takes her time. Runs her fingers over that meaningless graffiti, following the liquid scrawl of it; scoops up a handful of ash, smooths her thumb over one of those oracle-bones held loosely in hand, until she finds the flaw in the bone, the divot from the knifeblade with which the sacrifice was made. Then she worries her thumbnail into that mark, following the slice of it over the aging ivory. The searing pain and the cold that comes after, as eyesight begins to dim and death gathers all around. How you want to hold on to those last few breaths, even as breathing becomes all but impossible; a task too exhausting to contemplate -

oh, she is seized by the shadow of the memory, licks the saltwater from her lip, and lets it go.

Back to the altar, a circuit that swings wide and then narrows, that brings her back to this precise place at this precise time.

Sera runs her free hand thoughtfully over the pockmarked granite of her altar, feels the weight of it and the age of it, the way the granite has started to pit, worn away by time and salt, as so many things will be. Studies her hand, the shape and feel of it in the shadows if she cannot see, splayed open on the altar.

When the decision is made, Sera turns around quick as you please, and lifts herself up to sit on the altar. Insoucient. Irreverant. Legs dangling and swinging down from the height, her head cocked to listen to the echo of the waves without, the way their memory is dampened or magnified by the chambers of this cave.

Sera still has her mask in hand. Holds it against her thigh and turns to look at her followers. The Dionysian man, the lion club, the girl with strawberry cheeks, the inguana, all of them. Watches them where they still and where they stop or where they come and how far.

Sera's posture is loose, open, casual. Her knees and her thighs are parted, and her spine has the casual, boneless elegance of a young murder, a budding racketeer.

"Come here," to the man and to the woman; to the animals, to them all. Her eyes are likely first on the mask-woman, without eyes, with only the empty sockets surrounded by her living skin. Or perhaps to the Dionysian man, with his sensual mouth and heavy-lidded eyes.

"Come here."

Direction, invitation, prayer, plea.

And if they do, the woman with the blank-eyes and the mask-skin face, the man with the grapes, the girl with the strawberry-skin blush, Sera welcomes them, each, with an open-mouthed kiss.

Which she repeats.

again

again

again.

Serafíne

Stamina!

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

Serafíne

Dice: 2 d10 TN10 (8, 9) ( fail )

Serafíne

Perception + Awareness

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 4, 6, 7, 7, 10) ( success x 4 )

katabasis

Come here, Serafíne says, to them all. But first to the tall tall mask-woman without eyes (darkness where a presence should be), and then - perhaps - to the Dionysian man. The cub. Come here, she says, and they do one by one to meet and to take Serafíne's open-mouthed invitation. First is the man with the leopard skin who kisses Serafíne eagerly, forcefully; a rush, like being hit by a sudden wave: you see it coming, but you do not expect it. He kisses her until he is suddenly replaced by another mouth. He is followed by the blushing, strawberry girl, who whispers, Again, her breath hitching, her voice small. Again? And that 'Again' was a benediction -- the little god(dess) of blessings whispered in a moment of shared sensuousness.

Come here, Serafíne says, and they have followed her this far, are enthralled, this moment a kindle-thing, an awkward knocking of knees against other knees, a warm press of thigh against thigh against -- ; and there is the iguana, rilled and heavy and sharp-toothed, gripping Serafíne's shoulder, biting hard because that is what iguanas do, biting hard to hold her to nuzzle against her cheek and then biting again, and you know: this is when Serafíne leaves her own skin just a little: enters into their skins as well, then falls back into her own, leaves, falls, rises, falls: and that motion is good, too. Punctuated by the storm, you see, which provides backlight for her cult. The rain is falling hard;

and now it is the Dionysian man with the heavy-lidded eyes. He licks the blood from her shoulder and then he licks the salt from her arm and gently bites and breathes and sucks on the nipple of her left breast before he kisses her mouth too. His eyes stay open and they are as gold as the leopard who gave up its skin for that other man to wear. And now it is the lion, frisking around her ankles, paws heavy, fur liquid gold as it laps at her belly, and then it is

again, and again, and again, a will to touch her and to touch one another, to crawl inside to go home, to

comehere

-- but of course there is the tall tall mask-woman without eyes. What of her, hm? And what of their candles, their lanterns, some settled down, some not? What of all the other bodies pressing into the cliff-side temple now? It is warm; it is an oven, heat-kindling; it is thunder outside and rain outside and the sea outside. It is flicker-shiver of shadow mingling with storm-light: it is a certain reverence one moment -- and, next, not.

And the tall tall mask-woman: she comes last to Serafíne, pulling her mask away from her face if not quite off with two fingers, and she says,

What now, querida? You gotta answer for me?

Or perhaps she says,

[Do you have the answer to my question?]

Or maybe,

Are you the answer to my question?

Or even,

What now?

Serafíne

No difficulty

Dice: 2 d10 TN1 (2, 4) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

WP

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

Serafíne

What kind of a fucking question is that?

That is what Sera tosses back; Sera with her bruised mouth and bleeding hands; blood coiling from the wound on her shoulder right down her bicep, serpentine all around. Sera in the crowded and now-humid cave, the press of bodies filling it, the steam rising, the noise from the storm rumbling beneath the noise of the revelry, or keening over it.

When Sera wandered into this no-place she was half-clothed and now she is barely half-clothed, the remaining scraps disappear when and as she wills them. She pulls her revelers close and feels the beat of their breath against her skin, she leans back and pulls them after her.

More come; strangers who are stranger still. Loved ones she does not remember in this lifetime, and may have forgotten, too, in the last.

Somehow, and for quite some time, Sera has forgotten about the woman with the mask, the woman with no-eyes, the woman she sought out, first and last and always, among the procession, but now she is here again,

Sera still has her own mask in hand. She does not wear it. She feels it warm, the promise of its skin against her skin, remembers how it sealed itself, salt-tears and blooded copper, to her own, mouth and nose and brow and eye lashes.

Of course I'm the answer to your question.

Sera is saying, as she slips down from her rather obscene, rather insouciant pose on the altar, feet bare on the slippery rock of the floor of that seacave.

Always have been. Always will be.

You know that. You remember that better than I ever do.

--

What now?

Sera holds out her hands, palms-up. And closes her eyes. And pulls herself up and up and up and up

and up

and up

and up.

Into the storm, into the lightning, into the sea.

Or at the least, she fucking tries.

Serafíne

Stamina!

Dice: 3 d10 TN9 (6, 7, 10) ( success x 1 )

katabasis

You're comfortable now, aren't you, the woman says, says the woman, unmasked, looking at Serafíne.

The woman just looks at Serafíne. Her jaw is a hard edge and her eyes are knowing, are a lick of fire-flake or a spark of cinnamon and incense and bitter-salt. Serafíne tries to become the storm. Becoming is a difficult thing to do: transitional, immanent. The members of the processional do not touch the un-masked woman unless she wants them to. Unless she wants that lion cub to do reverence at her feet and lick her toes. Unless she wants the Dionysian-eyed man to do the same. The woman just looks at Serafíne, insouciant, much-kissed, on the woman's altar, her question and her answer, always have, always will, and the woman curls her lip, and it is a tricky expression to read.

You gon' do something?

You gonna remember?

Or just let tired reverence get tired, huh, honey?

You gonna do something?

-- as Serafíne reaches up. As Serafíne what nows. As Serafíne closes her eyes and pulls herself up and up and up and up

and up

and up

and up. Serafíne can see the woman watching her, even though Serafíne's eyes are closed. Because Serafíne can feel the savage moment (and it feels just like those moments before sound crashed upon her; broke against her, after being held back; after silence echoed like a church or a temple or a cave under the sea filled with sea-song and sea-shadow and there was nothing) that the woman reaches one (strong) arm to take Serafíne around the waist. Serafíne can hear her procession people she knows people she will know people she knew react and Serafíne can feel the woman drag her, drag her to the edge of the cliff-hole hermitage, to the edge, whirl her, whirl her, send her whirling,

and, whirling, Serafíne can see under her lashes the closure of them the glimmer simmer hiss of gold on her arm a sheet of fire

and she can feel nothing at her back, just the woman, pausing, holding Serafíne over the edge,

contemplatively,

before she kisses Serafíne. And then: it is swallowing the storm.

katabasis

[Char + Perf + Specialty.]

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

Serafíne

WITNESSED!

katabasis

[Oh, this one too. Manip + Performance.]

Dice: 8 d10 TN7 (2, 2, 4, 6, 6, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 2 )

katabasis

[And this one! Dex + Ath + C!]

Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

katabasis

[Er, no, that is Art. THIS is the Dex+Ath+C one.]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 8) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne

WITNESSED!

Serafíne

She is comfortable now, is Sera. Much kissed; worshiped, adored. Adored by the people she knew and the people she will know; the people who have been and the ones who will be. Sheltered in the cave, where her blooded hands and blooded feet can start to heal. Tasting the seaspray and hearing the storm without standing in the midst of it. Without bearing the breaking waves, the countervailing tear of a riptide, running back out to sea.

Breathing deep, the smoke in her lungs, the spark-and-flame of it, the seed caught like a flare between her sternum and her skin. The strangers-who-were and the strangers-who-will-be, her procession, receding into a faceless smear of strangers and lovers as she curls Sera curls her fingers thoughtfully around the ribbons of her mask and refuses to put it on.

She is reaching; god, she is trying to pull herself upward and upward right? to find the jagged burst of lightning and sink her teeth into it and let it pull her tearing afterward into the heart of the storm. But see: becoming; she is still in her skin, just longing, just yearning, just breathing, and her breath is coming harder and her breath is coming faster and her heart beats in ways she does not always remember that hearts can beat but she is still here, surrounded, loved and beloved.

You gon' do something? the woman asks and Sera whose eyes are closed cracks one of those eyes open, watches the woman's mouth move, between her lashes, feels the crack of challenge in it like a whip along her spine.

Yes. It is not even aloud. It is not even allowed. But yes: fuck, yes. Sera is gonna do something. She doesn't know fucking what but she's trying to climb some ladder, to pull herself brightly upward and that doesn't seem like it is working, does it. She wants more: not merely goddamned transcendence, Jesus Christ that yoga shit is Jim's bag.

You gonna remember - and Sera is on her feet now, has slid her skinny ass down from the altar to the cave floor, scattering her procession outward in eddying waves and she wants to say yes to this but she doesn't fucking know. The answer may be no. The answer is often no.

Remembering is not something Sera's do well -

tired reverence

- and her eyes flash open, briefly and wholly open. Some part of Sera is still trying to climb, see. Some part of Sera is pulling herself and pulling herself and longing and yearning and tearing herself up without tearing herself open.

Her procession will adore her; touch her only when she wishes them to. Kneel and nuzzle her feet, wipe her tears with their hair, hold her up, hold her down, just hold her. And yet, some part of her wants them to tear her apart.

--

Then the woman, drags her, whirling, whirling, drags her across the broken floor of the grotto, past the candles lit and unlit, the niches and statuary, the nameless, meaningless graffiti, through the worshipers congregated in her hall.

Sera's eyes are closed right? But she can see the woman still, feel her hands, on her skin and at her back, can feel her consideration, can feel the quiet, susserant cessation of the sea, the body-blow of the sound as it comes in waves, like the concussive blast of a piece of ordinance. Can see the flames licking her skin and feel the nothing at her back, the lashing storm again, its voice louder now, redoubled, furious.

The woman kisses Serafíne, and oh, Sera kisses her back. Hungry, open-mouthed, both hands burying themselves in her wild hair. Sera makes this noise that is lost in the storm-surge and feels the lightning fork and scissor and sizzle and strike inside her.

The wind lashes the cave mouth; there is nothing behind her.

She can feel the cliff's edge crumbling beneath her feet. She doesn't know if she'll remember, but she'll do everything in her power to make sure that she doesn't fucking forget. So:

Sera leaps, into the goddamned storm, whirls herself into the front. Throws herself off the edge of that cliff.

There was nothing else to be done.

katabasis

- and elsewhere, Serafíne asleep, sleeping, but finally back.

She will wake up soon, and if she will remember everything; she will know, or construct a story about what, she knows. She will remember the woman and she will remember everything that happened with an unrelenting clarity, clear-cut, a moment out of time which quietly refuses to be sublimated into new moments, which stays beside them.

She will wake up soon, and that is when, perhaps, some trouble will begin.

But that is soon.

katabasis

[EXIT, DISCIPLE.]

The balcony.

Serafíne

The Tap House would be a hole in the wall were it dignified with anything so grand for an entrance. Tucked away on the farthest storefront of an old warehouse surrounded by pulled up narrow-gauge railroad tracks once used for God-knows-what, the quaint little shopping center is populated by a mishmash of thrift stores and fair trade boutiques, tax prep businesses (one employs someone to dance around in a statue of Liberty costume out on the street) and small restaurants. And: the Tap House. Tiny, but two stories if you count the loft, with a rotating assortment of microbrews and the promise of at least one new keg on tap every goddamned night.

--

Grace got a text or some sort of invitation. Maybe she was just accidentally dialed at first, but still - she was invited. By the time Grace arrives, Sera and her entourage are already arrayed around the bar. The first people Grace sees are Dan and Dee, hanging out by the bar, talking to the tender while he draws them little 2 ounce samples of all the beers currently on draught. Dan, taller, in a button-down flannel shirt fitted to his whip-lean frame, the cuffs rolled up to reveal forearms covered in tattoos, a silver ring around his left thumb. Dan, with an arm loose around Dee's shoulders, friendly and familiar though not intimate, flirting with the bartender. Dee, milk-pale skin flushed from the alcohol she has already imbided, a certain muss to her rather precise 1950s inspired updo.

If Dan sees Grace, catches the feel of her resonance in the back of his throat, shifting beneath his feet, he looks up at back at her. Flashes her a little grin and hooks his thumb upstairs. There, Grace can see Sera, leaning hipslung against the railing where the balcony overlooks the bar, a beer in hand, chatting with someone who keeps leaning close to say something to the shell of her ear.

Grace

[Nightmares!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace

Sera's invitations are so numerous -- at least they are to Grace, the girl who most everyone thought was pretty damn strange before she found her calling with a group of people even stranger. Also, they're usually a bit tinged with fear that said invitation will be a party where she'll have to behave herself.

And by that, we mean not be herself. Parties are not a Grace thing, let's just say. At parties, one does not pull out a laptop and go on a long monologue about black hole firewalls using creative illustrations, because there's certain other behavior expected.

But Sera wants to meet at The Tap House. At first, Grace furrowed her brow at that -- why there? Isn't that where Sera got infected? But there might be reasons behind that. A big middle finger to fate -- 'you don't own me!' etc.

There are a few people in the world, and a few reasons in the world that would get even Grace to stop being a homebody for a while, and one of those people and one of those reasons is tied up in Sera. So, she responds, of course, that she'll be there.

Grace catches the eye of Dan when she walks in, grins back at him, and waves at Dee (oh she of the amazing gingerbread). Sera is never too hard to spot, and at the jerked thumb, Grace finds who she's looking for -- follows that feeling of amazement to its source.

"Hey, Sera."

Serafíne

Sera is dressed tonight as Seras often are: in something remarkably short and remarkably tight, showing rather remarkable amounts of skin. A leather skirt covered with a baker's dozen buckles of varying sizes and shapes, which has the grace to cover her ass, but just barely. Her top is a long-sleeved black lace thing with a neckline that - for a girl like Sera - is really rather modest. On close inspection, though, the black is absolutely see-through and entirely unlined, and therefore wholly immodest. Sera has not seen fit to pair it with a bra, and the lace fits her torso as if it were molded into place. Perhaps it was.

A dozen necklaces or so, of varying sizes, made of varying substances, are wrapped around her neck and spilling in varying lengths down her frame. One of these is a long length of tiny black pearls, which Sera is twining around and around her free hand, even as she holds her beer with her other, and watches Grace climb the steps from the downstairs bar to the upstairs lounge.

"Grace - " a smile for the other woman, warm and rather drunk, as Sera lifts her beer in a brief and gleaming toast. "You want a drink?"

Grace

Grace, in utter contrast, is wearing jeans and her grey turtleneck jacket, zipped to the top. As if she could wear anything else? Potentially. But it's not summer, and therefore not t-shirt weather.

Either way you slice it, Sera and Grace make an odd-looking couple.

"One maybe, I have to drive back," she responds, leaning her back to the balcony railing. "How you doing?"

Serafíne

"Have two." Sera induces, favoring Grace with this slow-burn of a smile. Sera illustrates the concept of two by holding up her thumb and middle finger, all two though there's a bit of confusion and her hand seems to float a little bit detatched from her mind and her thumb is up for a solid half-second of that illustration but

two

two

two, Sera means, "and I'll get you a cab home." Sera has had more than two; or perhaps she has had fewer than two but started the night with the ingestion of some other substance that has this effect on her. "I'm good," she's saying then, picking up the beer to have another swig. Watching Grace with eyes are are too dark, pupils that are too large. "I'm aaalllways good. You?"

Grace

Grace grins and looks at the floor for a second. Sera's a trip when she's tripping... "Heee. Kalen bought himself a computer lab. I may have been involved. I may have created a guy who worries that his servers are lonely and won't have anyone to talk to if he isn't there."

She looks back up at Sera with that bright grin plastered on her face still. "In short, I'm pretty good too."

Serafíne

"Grace, darling. Cariño, - " Sera has slung herself back on the railing again; she is not much taller than Grace herself, but something about the way she is put together makes her seem taller; makes her limbs look long and spare and lean. Perhaps it is just the illusion that is enhanced by the ridiculous heels she with which she has shod herself: tonight they are thigh-high boots built over what appear to be iron cages, filled with tiny skeletons and black roses and they add at least four and a half to five inches to Sera's height.

" - I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about it."

Arresting. She is so arresting; strangers watch them, openly or surreptitiously. They cannot help it and some part of Sera absolutely revels in their attention. Some of them study her body and some watch her mouth, catch the way she smiles at Grace, the clear way she is ready and willing and prepared to be charmed by the other woman and then glance back to their companions. Perhaps even pulling some piece of that warmth with them.

"But I love it when you smile like that."

Sera's eyes, dark in this light, dark with her dilated pupils, drop from Grace's eyes to her mouth, that bright grin plastered there.

"Guess whom I saw last week."

Grace

"I figured you might not know. Think of it like... a guy who buys a bunch of plants and talks to them, and honestly worries they'll miss him when he's gone. I told him they would talk to each other. I don't think he believes me," she says. "Whom did you see?" Grace asks, mimicking the 'whom'.

The people around them -- their eyes are drawn to Sera in much the way Grace's are. Arresting, she is. Grace doesn't so often trace the boundaries of the room she's in, or flit from one shiny object to the next when Sera's around. It just doesn't feel right. Sera's the only thing worth looking at.

It also makes it easy to ignore everyone else in the place. To pretend that she's not somewhere unsafe. With people. So maybe Grace is behaving a bit more human, a bit less paranoid. The skittishness is still there, somewhere, underneath.

Serafíne

Sera makes this noise in the back of her throat; it is quiet and low and dismissive, though not cruelly dismissive. Simply: dismissive. "Fuck." This noise, this quiet breath of laughter that does not fill her throat but does vibrate her soft palate, curve her mouth, found a certain light in her eyes. Tosses her head back so the that her curls dance away from the carefully maintained sidecut, then lifts her freehand to slide a few fingers through the tangled curls.

"He does know he's not tending a freshly planted field of newborn fucking babies, right?" The creature's eyes cut back to Grace then. Intent now, in a way that cannot really be dismissed or ignored. "I mean, he gets that people are the only things that matter. Right?"

--

"I saw Lena. That went fucking well."

Grace

"Lena?" Grace asks, and... maybe there's something about the way Sera says how that went -- all sarcasm-laden. "So how is she? I haven't seen much of her lately."

She says that like she's talking about a friend who's simply not been around, like it's nothing. But honestly, if they weren't at a bar, Grace would have a bit more to say. Like, haven't seen much of her since we rescued her from an exploding lab-prison. And why?

"But you know, I've seen her a couple times, and she was really doing good from what I can tell. What do you mean it went 'fucking well'?"

Serafíne

Sera's sarcasm is mild rather than deep; self-deprecating instead of scathing. There is a certain wry note in the inflection of her voice, and a rue beneath it. Sera is glancing away from grace in that moment, her darkly made-up eyes hooded by a sweep of sooty lashes, her profile sharp against the bevy of loose, golden shadows where the lights from the bar below are diffused across the lofty architecture of old beams and rafters visible from their perch in the balcony.

Her first answer is a supple and rather helpless shrug. If Grace looks closely, she can perhaps see the lights of the bar glittering across the surgery of Sera's eyes. Though perhaps not; perhaps Grace is not the sort to look closely; perhaps Grace does not know how to read the language of Sera's sudden unshed tears.

"Lena's been avoiding the chantry. She had some spiel about how busy she is with ordinary things and I don't doubt that, but - "

Inhale. Sera inhales through her nostrils, shoulders rising in a coil as she favors Grace with this peripheral sort of look, which skims Grace's profile, as if she were looking for or at the light shed by her skin, all immanant. " - it's also bullshit.

"Then she said she didn't want people to look at her and pity her. That people - that some of us - look at her like that, and it makes her angry.

"Which I think is a different kind of bullshit. It's mostly okay, you know? I mean: you need time and you take time, and all that shit, but you let it fester and it starts to all become real and you start walling yourself away -

"Anyway, she didn't like me talking to her about it, either. She got made and told me that I don't know anything about her, because I never cared enough to ask. And no one in the city knows anything about her, because no one cares to ask."

A deep, sighing breath out; Sera turns to look at Grace again, really look at her, all direct and drunk and stoned, always in her skin but not merely in her skin. Sort of bleeding out the way light does, shining. A deep and lambent glow.

"That was the saddest thing I'd heard in a really long time." Quiet, then. Even really rather solemn. "Made me cry."

Grace

"Oh... Well, fuck," Grace says, her joy now well and completely gone. "I knew she... I know she had to have had some problems dealing. We all did. Do. Whatever. But any time I've seen her since, she's seemed... not so bad."

But then, there was the time, in a clinic, when she raged. When she was certain that she hadn't actually escaped her prison. When Lena's mind was warped and raw and... how can you easily recover from that?

"I... I don't know. I don't like being all pushy about people's past and such. I mean, if she wanted to, I would listen, but I'd never just ask. Should I have?"

Grace, by the way, looks beyond worried. Crushed, really. Concerned that in her typical way of dealing with other people (which is to assume that they want the same treatment she does) she has managed to fuck it up again.

Serafíne

"Grace. Grace." Sera is saying, with that intensity that is her birthright; the weave of her voice, the dark, damp certainty of her eyes. Opening her arms in a way that suggests that she would very much light to wrap all of Grace - all of Grace's light and all of Grace's darkness and all of Grace's everything - right up inside them.

"There's no should. You're not a mind reader, and people fuck things up all the time. We're not - we're not algorhythms, you know? We're blood and bone and startled hearts and half-remembered wants and waking dreams and everything in between. How are you supposed to know?

"How is anyone?

"I think that she's got - all these fears tangled up in all these desires. If you think that people are going to pity you, because of who you are or what you've suffered - what the fuck are you going to share with them?

"She thinks you pity her. And just telling you that makes me almost pity her, because it's such a narrow way to live, all wrapped up in your own skin, seeing your fears written into everyone else's eyes. I don't know. I don't have an answer for you.

But if you wanna call her up, call her up. See where it goes."

Grace

"Oh, oh my no... I would just mess everything up," Grace says, her eyes going crazy in their back-and-forthness. "What would I say? If I say, 'oh Lena, I don't pity you' she'll just be mad at you for telling me."

Grace takes a breath, to steady herself. And then, "But you know... there's all kinds of things wound up in that word, pity. It can mean just having compassion for someone else, grieving for them. I did grieve for us, Sera. Not just for her, but myself too. All of us, you know. I can't really control that."

"But, pity her, as in... like... putting myself above her, like I think she's pitiful? No."

Serafíne

"I don't care if you tell her, Grace." Sera returns, ardent. Still watching Grace with that rather mesmeric intensity, the sort that seems hungry. Wanton. Wanting. Wanting. "I don't care if she gets mad at me."

Sera's voice is a dark and immediate tattoo, just then. Arresting in its vigor. When she says that she does not care she does not mean that she is indifferent. She means, and there is passion in the meaning, that she is willing to bear that anger, to open herself up to its lash, to feel its blast, if it meant somehow, someone getting through to Lena. Perhaps someone else, Sera having tried, and having failed.

"We can blunder through or we can wander 'round. Those are pretty much the only choices. One's easier. Less explosive. More predictable. The other - "

A sharp breath out; Sera turns away from Grace, half closing her eyes until the lights start to smear like running yolks. Which makes her feel both dizzy and bright, like she has been spiked through with narrow little tunnels that lead to the stars and back.

"You need to tell her those things, Grace. Not me. Because she doesn't fucking believe me. Maybe if she hears it from you; if she understands that you mean it, she'll see that she was wrong, and ask herself why.

"I do think you should call her. But if you don't want to, I understand. I won't reproach you for it."

Grace

"I'm just... I'm scared I'll hurt her," Grace says, after a long while staring at the floor. "But then, I'm scared now, if I don't reach out to her, then that will hurt her."

Grace's hands turn into fists, not out of violence, but out of a need to do something with them. They call this a double-bind. A Catch-22. Must, but cannot. Cannot, but must.

"Maybe... maybe I will. I just... You said something about me getting a drink?" the barest hint of a wry smile then, and eyes that slide up to Sera's from the ground. Yes, because that's a great idea: drunk dial Lena.

Serafíne

"That's my Grace," Sera murmurs, turning back to the Virtual Adept then. Leaning in for that hug, enfolding Grace in her arms, pressing her mouth so briefly, so reverently, to Grace's temple. Eyes closed, following the shifting-thing-that-doesn't-love-a-wall sensation of Grace's resonance with the distracted aura of a hungry, pollen-drunk bee. Staying too close, for too long, nose in Grace's hair because she enjoys the sensation.

"Remember that. Remember both those things. And you'll be fine.

"Now come on," peeling away at last, untangling most-of-herself only to grab Grace's hand, so that they will tangle only-fingers. Drafting Grace to follow behind her, back down the stairs to the bar. "Let me get you that drink."

Or twelve.

Welcome home.

Pan

Before the sun did Pan rose. He used the telephone in the kitchen to call the church and leave a message on its answering machine bidding Rosa call him at this number. He did not tell her what the number was nor did it register on the telephone in the office but she knew the number anyway. Wrote it down before he went away from them and claimed to keep it locked up. She knew herself to be a liability and did not want to be a liability and so she kept it safe.

He had few things to pack. Everything he brought with him still fit into the duffel bag and everything others gave to him he found room alongside everything else. He washed the bedding from the room where he'd slept the last two months and put it back where he found it. Dusted down the furniture and cleaned the carpet with the carpet sweeper. By the time the sky lightened with winter sun he had moved to the kitchen to read. These things killed time until the phone rang.

"Are you coming back?" Rosa asked.
"Yeah," he said.
"When should I tell Manuel you're coming back?"
"Today."
"Are you joking? That's not enough time!"
"La rectoría tiene dos pisos, ¿no? Me alojaré en el piso de arriba hasta él sale."

Rosa sighed a deep and weary sigh.

"¿De acuerdo?" he asked.
"Whatever you want, Francisco," she said. "I'll tell him when he gets here."
"Thank you."

---

By the time the others in the house awaken from their nightmares and their parrying of nightmares the Chorister has left the place. His room is always clean when he is not in it but it has an empty cleanliness today. Shoshannah may be the first to find the note but even if she isn't it stays on the refrigerator for a time. The writing is tall and thin and born of a pen that did not shake in the owner's hand.

Gone back to the church, it says.
Thank you for the tea & hospitality.
Call if you have trouble.
-- Fr. Echeverría

---

Mid-morning saw the street where La Iglesia del Buen Pastor stood hemmed in by cars parked on either side. The only empty space was a 15-meter no-fly zone around a yellow fire hydrant. Someone chained a bicycle to the NO STANDING sign at the corner of the street. The children were back in school and the daycare center playground at the back of the property rang with the sound of the little kids chasing each other around while the aides stood watching them.

Amanda and Claudia were out front. Claudia, in her forties, was smoking a cigarette and Amanda, nineteen years old, wore the bruises of sleep deprivation like a second skin. She was not smoking but she wanted to stand and talk to Claudia anyway. They were the first to see a familiar red Toyota Tacoma pull into the church driveway.

"Santo cielo," said Claudia.
"Hi Father Francisco!" Amanda called out after he closed the driver's side door.

He lifted a hand to wave and walked down the sidewalk and past the front door of the church. Bypassed it to greet the women. He hugged Claudia first and then hugged Amanda. He and Claudia spoke in brief Spanish about the daycare center staffing and when she inquired after his health he did not lie. He said he was feeling better.

"Tan flaco está," said Claudia.
"Sí," said Pan, "pero cuando las Marianas descubran que yo he regresado, voy a aumentar."

Claudia laughed. Amanda shuffled her weight between her feet and looked up at the priest's face.

"I know you just got back," she said. "But if you have a minute, can I talk to you? Now?"
"Of course."

They waved goodbye to Claudia and started towards the breezeway between the daycare and the church.

"Besides," he said, "if you're with me when I go in the office, maybe Rosa won't yell quite so much."

Sera

Father Francisco Echeverría has a few days to settle into the routine of bachelor religious life. Which must feel both familiar and strange, like slipping one's arm's into a favorite sweater rediscovered, years later, on the closet floor. Oh, yes. I remember you.

The morning light and the spare streets and their emptiness. The service workers who stop by for the earliest mass before heading off to man the coffee shops and bakeries, the convenience stores and muffler shops, the lunch counters and the parking garages. The toddlers still scrubbing sleep from their eyes being handed off to the day care workers scrubbing sleep from their own. The earliest bus and the early bus and the still fucking early bus, hydraulics sighing as they kneel at the corner, to expel or accept a new congregant. The prostitutes and the dealers and the homeless vets who might stumble by on their way to wherever it is they go when the sun threatens to show up in the sky.

--

Morning. It is morning. No candles are yet lit and the sky is dark but lightening somewhere, on of those strange corners of it, out to the east, the long flat expanse of the high fucking plains, and the streets are quiet and sanctuary proper has that echoing, empty sense that must make it feel haunted to strangers who do not believe in his god. Incense, candle wax, Murphy's English Soap: all familiar, all sunk into the plaster and the lathe, the beams and the nave.

Another scent too. Less common though not unknown here, lingering in her hair and on her skin.

She's sitting in the fifth or sixth pew, close to the center aisle, legs tucked up beneath her body, elbow resting on the spine of the bench, temple cradled in the heel of her palm, slouched bonelessly aslant, the rise and fall of her shoulders so slow and steady that he might assume that she fell asleep like that, waiting for him because why else would she be here at 4:49 a.m. on a Saturday morning, not far from that statue of the Virgin Mary, crowned with a slow-drying circlet of roses by the League this Thursday last. Perhaps in honor of his return.

Not asleep, though.

Because she stirs, quiet and lazy as he approaches. Lifts her head from her hand and gives him a half-smile over her shoulder and something about the way she moves, the indolent pleasure she takes in that movement, tells him with certainty that she is a long way from sober.

--

Maybe he stops in the middle of the central aisle, hand on the back of her pew, a solid and strangely bright presence at her back, in a way that makes her wonder at the cold fire of the each breath she pulls into her lungs. The way the shadows were banished to all but the farthest corners the moment he walked through the door.

Makes her wonder at the immediacy of the moment. At the immediacy of every moment.

She's already standing up, Sera. And god she's wearing the most ridiculous pair of Nina Ricci's, but he hardly has time to glance down and take them in because she's tumbling out of the pew and reaching for him and putting her arms around his neck and laying her head against his shoulder for a long, solid moment, intimate as you please.

Lifts her head a moment later, pulls back far enough that she can find his eyes in the shadows of the sanctuary and meet them and find herself reflected therein, and favor him with a dreaming sort of smile.

"I like your statue of Mary," Sera tells him, mouth curving around the words. She does not tell him that they have been talking, Mary and Sera, but the way she smiles, oh, like she's met a new crush. An old friend. A soon-to-be-lover.

Her arms are still around his shoulders, her fingers laced behind his neck, and rather like Don Quihoxte tilting at windmills, she leans in closer then, inhales through her nose. Settles her mouth at his ear. And says, "I just hope she didn't actually die a Virgin.

"Welcome home, Pan."

She lets him go, then. And saunters out the door.