Late Sunday night - technically Monday morning - Hawksley gets a call from Dan. Not a wanna hang out? text that means wanna fool around now that Jeremy is pretty much out of the picture. A straight-up phone call, ringtone and everything.
Dan's in a bar somewhere. Of course he is: he goes out for a living, it seems, almost as much as Sera. Certainly as much as Sera because someone has to keep an eye on her. God knows where she would end up, or in what condition, with her many Collinses to prepare the way and follow behind and right her when she starts to fall.
Voices in the background move like a confluent wave - peaks and troughs of voice.
"Hey man - " Dan is saying, into voice mail or perhaps Hawksley's ear. An abrupt cessation of noise then, as he ducks through the front door of the place and his resolves itself, sharpens against the relative silence of a city street after midnight on a school ight. The ambulance has lights on, sirens off. Red and white smear against the dark street. "Listen, Sera collapsed. She had a seizure or something. I don't know if she got some bad acid or something but they're taking her to [Insert Hospital Close to East Colfax Here]. I thought you'd want to know."
HawksleyA real live phone call. From Dan.
So before Hawksley even picks up, his heart sinks, and his stomach drops. He is sitting up in his palatial bed, covers pooling around his abdomen, rubbing his face with one broad, long-fingered hand and making sure he sighs before he hits the Accept button and puts it to his ear. "Hey," is all he says, because it is late-Sunday-night into Monday morning and because he knows it's Dan, and because he is reasonably sure the message is something's up with Sera.
Given that, it's also reasonable, even in his sleep-riddled state, that if Dan is calling him because something is up with Sera, it's because that something is either Really Serious or Very Magical, and Dan is out of his depth. Sometimes it's both; after all, Sera survived just fine with Dan on her side long before Hawksley ever showed up. And sometimes, like tonight, it's just that something is up with Sera, and Dan knows that Hawksley is one of those people you call.
Like he cares or something.
Cares that Sera collapsed, that Sera had a seizure or something, and Hawksley is almost certain that surely Sera must have had a seizure at some point in her life before this, because that's what happens to people who live the way she does, sometimes their brains and bodies just say NOPE and turn themselves off.
"Rose?" he repeats, then sniffs, and nods, which is useless since Dan isn't there to see him, and anyway it's dark and the curtains are thick and blot out even the moonlight. Dan confirms, and Hawksley sniffs again, eyes closed because he still wants to be asleep, like a bird whose cage is hooded. "Do you think it was something weird?"
Weird is code, Dan. You know this.
Serafíne"I didn't meant to wake you," Dan is saying, then. Because it is one of those things you say. Because against the street and its silence he can hear the sleep in Hawksley's voice. Because - in the moment - he never quite considered that Other People Sleep at the hours he considers normal, ordinary, business hours, even, because Sera. Because he hadn't thought that the street would be this quiet and is surprised when he exits the bar to find it so.
Someone's behind Dan, then. Hawksley cannot see it but he can perhaps hear the moment of distraction, the taffy-pull of Dan's whiskey-roughened voice away from the phone. The signal-noise of his beard and flannel against the microphone. The woman's voice, not specific but audible as a cloud, like the non-sense rumble of adults all distant in a Peanuts cartoon. Really it is just Dee, telling Dan that the cab she called is on its way."Okay, - thanks, you and Rick can finish up, right?" is what Hawksley hears as Dan slips the phone between his shoulder and ear again. This cross-talk, before a "Sorry about that," confirms that Hawksley once more has Dan's full attention for consideration of whether or not what happened was something weird.
Oh, yes. Dan understands the code.
He is quiet a minute, then exhales a long, warm breath into Hawksley's ear, considering. Considerate. Rather more thoughtful than you'd think. "Yeah," Dan confirms, "She's been acting weird for a few days, maybe a bit longer. Told me the other day she was seeing things. Apparently she spent a few hours Saturday a week ago talking to the Virgin Mary and I don't think she was even particularly high that night." A flush of affection in his voice and something else, as Dan realizes that he is starting to ramble and, simply: stops.
"Tonight, though, I could taste it in the air."
The way one tastes a summer storm.
--"Listen, she's gonna want out of there as soon as she wakes up. I can take the night shift if you want day? Or I can call Sid or somebody. That priest, maybe. I just - "
A sharp breath out. Dan's worried. He is also trying very hard not to be.
HawksleyHawksley is not filled enough with the thoughts of other people's comfort to think to tell Dan not to worry about waking him, that it's all right. He just thinks it's a dumb thing to say. Of course Dan didn't mean to wake him, or else Dan thought it was important enough, so why is he saying something apologetic without an apology because his heart isn't in it because his heart is somewhere else? Hawksley's guess about the location of Dan's heart is in the back of an ambulance.
Yeah. It was something 'weird'. Air quotes and all. Particularly high. The taste.
Hawksley's eyes are closed and his breathing is steady. He slowly opens them, and Dan can hear the deep inhale as though Hawksley is waking anew. "There won't be a night and a day unless something is seriously wrong: an aneurysm, a clot, something like that. If it was just weird bullshit and she seized, she'll be in and out faster than you think. They'll do tests but if she's conscious and otherwise cleared she'll go home.
"Frankly, unless she's totally unresponsive, you'll probably be waiting in the emergency department for a while before anyone even looks at her."
He yawns, but away from the phone, so it doesn't sound like boredom. Just weariness. Just... like he's done something like this before. "Don't ring the alarm too hard, man. I know what happened last time she wasn't okay was really, really bad. But last time won't be every time. Nil desperandum y'know?"
Dan probably doesn't know. Hawksley doesn't actually speak Latin. He just quotes it a lot.
"I'm gonna head over," he decides, rough in voice but not in certainty. "If she's conscious she'll be all 'ooh Hawksley you big strong man you came to hug me get me out of here Dan won't listen' and I'll be the big damn hero."
He's flipping back the covers, pausing his rambling. "She is conscious, right?"
SerafíneThe conversation shifts. Hawksley talks and Dan is mostly listening. The adrenaline that spiked into his blood when Sera seized or went nuts or what the fuck ever is starting to desert him. His heart rate is still up but he can feel it slowing. As the sharpest moments of tension recede, what is left is a distracted ache. A slowing tenderness, an awareness of the world around him. The voice of a friend in his ear; the snow in its dirty, stultifying piles at the edge of the sidewalk, around the long stems of streetlights. The ambulance lights are gone. Dan was going to steady himself, but instead, he allows himself to be steadied by the certainties in Hawksley's voice. Maybe he even hears the experience there, though he may not recognize it until some time later.
Hawksley would perhaps be surprised at the things Dan knows. Take, for example, that bit of Latin. Nil desperandum, you know? Dan makes a noise, see like yeah, he does know. Inserts, quite neatly into the interregnum between Hawksley's thoughts: "Teucro duce at auspice Teucro." - with a quiet snort of laughter that sounds more like - what? Relief; recognition; afterburn. Oh, and Horace is one of the Things Dan Knows.
That snort of laughter deepens into an actual chuckle as Hawskley outlines the possible trajectory of the next few hours; how just by showing up he might make himself into a big damn hero, perhaps at Dan's expense. Dan does not mention that Hawksley could also make himself into a big damn hero by buttering a slice of toast for Sera or telling her that yes, the sky is fucking blue or green, or polka dotted, whatever color she thinks it might be at the moment. He probably thinks that, though, does Dan, and the thought both steadies and warms him.
--
She is conscious, right?"Naw, man." This, this is self-evident to Dan, see. Because, "Sera hates hospitals."
And Hate - like Weird - is code, though perhaps it is code that Hawksley does not entirely have the measure of yet. It is the word Sera uses. It is the word Sera substitutes for unreasoning heart-stopping fear. Or, perhaps all things considered, perfectly reasonable heart-stopping fear. "If she were conscious she never would've let them take her. They can't transport you against your will."
So, yeah. Not Dan's - or Sera's - first rodeo. But Hawksley knew that, and probably always has. Look at the things she does. Look at the way she lives.
"Listen, my cab's pulling up. I'll see you. By the way, I didn't give them her real name. Ask for Sera Davies when you get there." A brief pause; then, "Oh, you might tell them you're her brother or something. Sometimes they get weird about giving info to people who aren't relatives."
If Dan had thought of that sooner he'd be riding in the ambulance with her, instead of taking a cab, five or ten minutes behind.
Hawksley"See, you get it," Hawksley says, ever so comfortingly, at Dan's rambling off of some Latin. There you go. If you're able to speak Latin quotes here and there, you must be okay.
Without ever saying it, or consciously thinking it, some part of Hawksley believes this.
--
But Sera is not conscious, and Hawksley frowns, furrowing his brow in consternation. He's cradling his phone against his shoulder as he reaches into his closet, looking for jeans, finding a stylishly distressed pair that cost a normal person's car payment. He steps into a pair of boxer-briefs first, steps into the jeans second, pulling them up. He doesn't bother to belt them, because
and this part is consciously thought,
he believes that when Sera wakes up, this will comfort her.
"Yeah," he says, regarding Sera's 'hate' of hospitals, which he didn't know. He didn't infer that, really, despite the fact that when he came to see her at that one dude's clinic she was all but inconsolable. He figured that was the whole nearly-dying thing. Hell, he's man enough to admit that during a particularly bad bout of the flu he has gotten at least a bit misty-eyed, insisting to Collins that he was NEVER EVER going to get better, he was going to feel horrible FOREVER. But no: Sera hates hospitals. Sera hates them enough that she never would have let them take her, seizure or no seizure.
"Well," Hawksley goes on, because you can't keep a good man down, "she'll wake up. Probably even in the ambulance."
Cuz that would end well. He reaches for a shirt, yanking it off a hanger. "Will do man. See you soon."
They hang up. Hawksley sets his phone aside, pulling on his t-shirt, pulling on something cashmere over that, getting socks, For once, he decides not to yell for Collins. He dresses himself. He skims his fingers through his hair, ignores the extra hair on his face and neck, shoves his phone and wallet into his pocket, gets his coat from downstairs, braves the icy weather to -- not the Porsche -- but Collins's car, which is really Hawksley's car in many ways anyway. The big one, big and luxurious and AWD. It has heated seats, too. It has room for Dan if he wants it, Dee if she's there, Sera too. It's not quite as hazardous on icy roads.
It would take him 20 minutes if the roads weren't all but completely empty of drivers, and if he weren't driving the way he does, as though the laws of man don't apply to him.
Which of course they don't.
--
He is at Rose before too long, striding into the emergency department wearing a coat worthy of Arctic expeditions as well as Parisian runways, looking around for Dan, that man who is as thin as Hawksley is muscled and as tattooed as Hawksley is pristine.
SerafíneThere may be a bit of a go-round with the clerks out front, but Hawksley can get himself past them. He's smarter than they are and richer than they are and prettier than they are and all these things matter when it comes to getting what you want, when you want it, in life. He's also golden, fucking magic. That helps, too.
Hawksley finds Dan in the ER Department proper, standing outside one of those windowed rooms, leaning so that his shoulderblades rest against the glass. He's wearing a button-down flannel with the cuffs rolled up to reveal - yes - his many tattoos over a t-shirt, jeans and battered leather boots. If he started the night with a winter coat, well, the man left it behind. There's a dark smear of blood on his jeans at the hip where his wallet chain is clipped to the belt loop of his jeans. Easy to miss, easy to overlook. The blood on his flannel is harder to see. It blends in with the red plaid pattern.
Dan has muscle definition only because he has so little goddamned body fat. Still, a certain whipcord athleticism defines him, already straightning, as he sees or perhaps feels Hawskley's presence. When the Hermetic is close enough, Dan reaches out his right hand to shake Hawksley's, pulling the other man in for one of those hand-shake shoulder-bump things that guys do.
"That was fast." Dan, wry, and weary, the way you're weary when a young night has suddenly gone old. He smells like a bar. Someone named Sera spilled her tequila every fucking where when she seized. He glances over his shoulder, through that window, as he pulls back. "They're still working on her."
So they are.
--Nothing in this interlude is likely to change Hawksley's perception of Sera's fragility. She just looks small in that hospital bed, even glimpsed through a window that is itself smeared over with the dazzling reflections of the fluorescent lights illuminated the central hub of the ER. Hooked up to a half-dozen monitors that make a half-dozen different noises, without her animate personality to claim the additional space she always seems to be demanding of the world.
While they wait for the people inside to finish whatever is so damned important that they kicked Dan out of the room, Dan tells Hawksley about that night. They hadn't played out in months. Sera wanted to do a show where they didn't have to invite anyone, or worry about the audience. What better night than the night of the Super Bowl? She was fine on stage, drinking yeah. Skipped out on the break-down the way she always does, then made a beeline across the bar like she was gonna go make out with someone. The way she does. Dan lost track of her for a bit, but then she was near the stage, and fell and had a seizure, or had a seizure and fell. Cracked her head open on something.
Dan is very matter-of-fact, low-voiced, intimate. Glances over his shoulder now and then through the glass with a frown that asserts itself both in his brow and through his beard.Someone comes out of the room, holding a plastic tub with Sera's jewelry. Piles of bangles, the paste-and-mirrors-and-glass bracelets he picked up for her in Morocco, bright pieces that caught his eye. A leather cuff full of ridiculous spikes, which Hawksley did not pick up in Morocco - that one is a Sera original. A bicycle chain she was wearing as a necklace, the platinum suggestion of a giant safety pin she had stuck through the apex of her left ear. The beaten-gold ring her gave her after Christmas, which - and he has no reason to know this - she has worn ever since. Some oxidized steel piece that looks more like a weapon than an ornament. A bright-eyed girl with fake oxblood-red hair, too much make-up and the habit of turning every statement into a question holds the little pink kidney shaped tub out to Dan and Hawksley, inquiring all helpful-like, "Did you want her jewelry or...?" If Hawksley does not think to claim the little tub, Dan will.
She has eyebrows that look painted-on.
--
Maybe it is just that sense of dislocation that one associates with places like this, that surreality that accompanies the punctuate interruption of one's ordinary life, like a door, or a passageway, or -
Yeah. The attending emerges just then. He looks tired. "She's stable," he tells them, " - but non-responsive. We don't have an explanation for that but she certainly has a concussion from the head injury and do you have any idea what her blood alcohol level was?"
The guy is looking expectantly at Hawksley and Dan, then. More Hawksley than Dan. He actually wants them to guess but he also wants them to be wrong and he wants to answer the question himself. Which he will, momentarily, " ...zero point three-one. Which is not the highest I've ever seen, but is the highest I've seen tonight. The EMTs also found LSD on her. So.
"That combination plus the head injury. Once we get her pregnancy test results back, we'll take her radiology and get a CT scan to see if she has a brain bleed or something, and go from there. Oh, I put steri-strips on that lac, instead of suturing it. I figure she'd want a plastic surgeon to look at it. They won't show up unless she has insurance, though."
Or money. They'd show up for cash money, too.
--
There's just one chair, which Dan and Hawksley must occupy alternately and many people who come in. To check the IV or draw blood or frown at her chart or her various monitors. Which are strange, the monitors. Sera's heart is beating fast, faster. Like she's in a race, or skydiving, or has just learned how to inhale the ocean, and her breathing is now regular, next ragged, then arresting. So perhaps she is not merely unconscious. Perhaps she is also, Very Far Away.
--
At some point the confirmation comes that Sera is Not Pregnant and she is wheeled away for her radiology studies. Which come back clean, the attending returns to tell them sometime after Sera is returned. No aneurysm, no blood clots. No hematomas, except the extradural one they can all see, the spreading bruise surrounding the ragged laceration that extends from her right temple down through the soft, downy buzz of her shaved sidecut. That guy might go so far as to take Hawksley aside and tell him that even if the hospital is willing to keep her no more than overnight if she wakes up, he might be able to get a 72 hour involuntary hold. If he wants to. Based on the substances in her system. Enough time for her to start detox, maybe. Maybe the scare will convice her to get help.
--
There is a hell of a lot of waiting. That sense of dislocation; of strangeness; of change lingers like an aura around Sera. Like a corona of some electrical current, like a charge. It is difficult to describe and tough to distinguish from the sleep deprivation and the unusual circumstances and subtle, too. But strengthening.Sometime between four-thirty and five a.m., Sera slips from whereever-she-was into actual sleep. Her heart rate slows; her breathing deepens. Someone, naturally, comes to record these facts on a wheeled computer. They don't try to wake her.
But she will awaken, soon.
HawksleyThe way Hawksley walks in, and the way Hawksley looks, it would not be strange if the people who see him think he works here. Or, perhaps more likely: that he owns the hospital, or his daddy does, and trying to approach him, question him, stop him, is just going to be more trouble than it's worth, especially at this hour.
He directs himself to Dan, and he notices the blood because it's turned black, see, and because he's up close and because he's paying attention to Dan in a way that no one else here is. When Dan pulls him in, Hawksley's arm goes around his shoulders for a few seconds longer than a quick bump, and if in those seconds Dan feels a subtle urge to let his spine relax and exhale a heavy breath, well: no one would blame him. It's like being hugged by the sun.
Or a sun god.
Drawing back, he cocks his head as Dan speaks, glances the way Dan glances, then frowns through the glass.
He does not think Sera is fragile, but he does think she is small. She is small. Everyone seems small to him. It has nothing to do with physical size. Everything to do with perspective.
--
Oxblood-Hair thinks Hawksley may be family -- he is lovely and sharp and there is a certain aquiline nature to his nose that is similar to Sera's, and they are both fair-haired so why not -- and that Dan may be boyfriend. She has both wrong, in part because when you know Sera, people do not fit neatly into one sort of relationship or another. Dan is family and Dan is colleague and Dan likes boys but that doesn't mean he and Sera haven't fooled around. Hawksley gives her jewelry and orgasms, but he's not her boyfriend and sometimes there is a familial nature to simply Being What They Are.
Whatever: Dan takes the pink kidney-bean tub because Hawksley doesn't think to do so. He notices the ring in there, though, and other things he got her, and is absurdly cheerful about it for a moment.
--
He doesn't guess for the attending. He's standing there in denim and cashmere, annoyed that no one is there to hold his coat for him, but he knows that between he and Dan, he looks like the one to talk to. He looks clean and he looks like money and he has an air of erudition about him. He must be the responsible one, though in reality he is only moderately more responsible than Sera is and has only known Sera for a matter of months where Dan has kept her alive more than a few times during the years he's been at her side.
But yeah, sure, talk to the guy with the nice clothes and the expensive watch who isn't blood-stained, tequila-soaked, tattooed. Makes sense.
He doesn't look surprised. At the BAC, at the LSD. He gives a sharp blink and a brief narrowing of his pupils at the mention of a pregnancy test but goes right back to impassive as they mention talk about strips and sutures and surgery. He glances to the side at Dan. To himself, he thinks Sera very well might want a scar. He's not sure why he thinks it; he just feels it like a pulse, even knowing that he could be wrong.
--
Finally in the room, he goes over to peer at Sera, looking her over, tilting his head this way and that. He tosses his coat over the back of that single chair, and he doesn't try to take a turn in it, partly because now that he's awake, he's quite alert. He not unused to being awake at bizarre hours, doing bizarre things. Maybe not hanging out in hospitals, though. Eventually he wanders over and matter-of-factly tells Sera's face, which isn't looking too hot at the moment: "Whiskey brickle!"
Sadly, the suggestion of an alcohol-laced ice cream does not succeed in waking her up, or prove that she's just a big faker. Hawksley frowns.
--
Some guy really helpfully tells Hawksley they could get her in an involuntary hold. Hawksley makes his face look pained and, unbidden, puts his hand on the guy's shoulder. He exhales heavily, wearily. "Thanks, man," he says, with that ever-so-haunted look in his eyes, "but we've tried that before. It won't do any good."
Squeezes the shoulder. Claps it roughly, in a manly-type fashion. Turns away, to hide the rising tide of emotion that is not manifesting in a genuine sense in his eyes.
He scuffs his hand idly over Dan's scalp when he passes by again, the way you might soothe someone. His hand manages the gesture easily, familiarly. You wouldn't expect it of him, unless you'd felt it. "That's the thing about medical professionals," he says, wise man that he is, "they just wanna feel like they're helping someone."
But we already knew you were a dick, Hawksley.
--
There's enough room at the foot of Sera's hospital bed that Hawksley, because he does what he wants, decides to sit on it, then lie back on it, head hanging off one side and legs off the other, feet firmly planted. He has his hands laced with strength and elegance over his midsection.
He is near enough to feel the vibrations in the air, and he closes his eyes to sense it. He loses himself in it, an endless transitional point, the moment before a leap becomes a fall or a gate becomes a way. He opens one eye when someone comes in to check on her, stares at them, watches them, and they feel like an intruder, a mouse, and to him, they are.
When they depart his eye closes again, and though he does not sleep, he is slow to open his eyes, slow to sit up, when Sera does,
finally,
wake.
SerafíneThere is a cave and there is a wild-haired and wild-eyed woman whom Sera has known since her awakening, whom she has never seen before. And that woman is standing in the midst of sacrificial smoke and her feet are bare over sacrificial bones in an oracle's graffiti-laced grotto and she has a voice like thunder beyond the horizon and she has a mouth like rain and she wears lightning the way other women wear silk, like water. Sera would like to become part of the storm part of the sky, part of the scissoring strikes of lightning flashing down to the churning sea and she is reaching and reaching but she does not know how to climb that high. There is a cave and a mouth and the sea below is black. They are dancing, whirling like dervishes, dark and sacred and centripetal and she is going to be flung and before she can be flung, she jumps -
Oh, she jumps.
This is how she wakes. Comes from that, vivid and bright and entire to this place, all-at-once.
She breathes in a long deep breath through her nose and it seems as if that breath awakens her. Pulls her rather upright in the bed - this sharp inhale and for several tenous beats of her waking heart Sera does not understand where she is or who she is or that she is and her tired and rather dazed eyes drift over the ER bay, dull and unseeing.
Another breath and another breath and reason is returning to her and she doesn't know why she isn't always There but beyond that she thinks at the very first that she must be home and in her bed because hello Hawksley the sheets smell like you and there is she turns her head just so hell Dan there-you-are who-I-am.
The panic hits a moment later, the visceral twist of it seizing her gut, thrashing in her eyes like a broken-winged bird caught in a net or a fucking cage, this contraction of fear that is briefly, entirely overwhelming to her.
She could go catatonic. She has gone catatonic but she does not tonight. There is enough reason and will in her blood and bones that she pulls those bright pieces of herself back in toward the inevitable center and sits forward and starts tearing those damned monitors. The pulse-oximeter dies a quiet death but the heart monitors start going nuts, all flatline as they come away from her skin in tearing succession. The IV is next and she just rips it out as she starts blundering upright, to her unsteady feet, that stupid, undignified hospital gown gaping open at the back while blood trickles down her right arm and the room starts to spin because concussion.
"I'm getting out of here."
Sera tells them both: drunk, ragged, determined. So fucking determined.
And new.
Hawksley's a rich bastard. He's been to Venice. Why does the air around her taste like the Bridge of Sighs?
HawksleyThere's no cave. There's no woman. There's no graffiti, no thunder, nothing to leap from or into, because
there's just a hospital room, and it's icky and cold and gross and Sera is being ridiculous in a way that Hawksley has never seen her be ridiculous. But he is sitting up at the end of the bed, propping himself up on his elbows as she stirs, looking at her as she is moving quickly, casting her eyes around, her limbs tensing up like spiderlegs, her eyes widening like waxing moons, and his guts feel cold and clammy inside of him as she goes for tubes and sensors, yanking them out before he can stop her.
She is making him remember things.
And he wants to be cavalier about all this, to treat her like a grown-ass woman and yeah, sure, if she wants to go, then fine: they'll go. She's an adult. She's an Awakened mage, and something about her feels different and he has a pretty damn good idea he knows what's going on, but there's blood dripping down her arm and she's swaying and aaannnyyy second now someone is going to rush into this room because of that code.
So Hawksley is on his feet, lithe as though his bones really were hollow, strong enough to remind everyone that they actually aren't, and his feet land solidly on the floor, protected from its chill because he is wearing shoes, thank you.
And he takes her hand in his hand, which is enough to make contact, but enough to give her primary control over her body,
and enough to help him grab hold of her if she starts to well and truly fall.
"Yes," he says, first of all, firmly, as she says she's getting out. "But if you try and do it like this, someone's going to come in here and sedate you and make you stay and it'll be this whole big thing that will take even longer. So for fuck's sake, take a deep breath, sit down, and we'll get out of here like normal people."
People are coming. Hawksley is holding her hand and talking perhaps a bit too quickly for her to process. "I mean it, Sera. Just tell yourself that every time you make yourself take a deep breath, you're six seconds closer to walking out of here instead of panicking and adding time by the half-hour. Okay?"
SerafíneSera is behaving ridiculously. Her panic is exigent, physical, and so fucking bright it seems to fill the entirety of her senses and her heart is beating so fast that there does not seem to cessation between the squeezing contractions, just one long, rending sort of seizure. Her shoulders are sharply, starkly tense, all bony hollows where the cheap, ugly hospital gown is slipping down over the the rather spare forward curve of the joint and her dilated pupils contract like so as her focus sharpens on Hawksley because he is close, because he is immediate and looming in her foreground, but there's movement behind him.
Dan, waking as that stupid fucking heart monitor starts keening out its flatline, startling to his feet, not quite upsetting the pink-kidney tub full of Sera's jewelry cradled in his arms, but close. Close. And beyond him, the background smear of movement as the staff who had been lounging at the central desk, pouring over the menu of the all-night diner trying to decide what to order in for breakfast or checking out the pictures of Jason-the-Ward-Clerk's recent honeymoon in Cancun are moving in a controlled scramble. This is a routine sort of disaster for them, which they handle with remarkable regularity. Someone's grabbing a crash cart or what the fuck ever -
- and Sera's blue eyes are cutting back to Hawksley. He is speaking. She can hear him speaking the way she hears her heart beating the way she feels the sharp chill of her bare feet against the ugly-ass linoleum and she can feel his resonance, bright and sun-drenched and soaring, expansive, winged, as she can feel both the warmth and strength of his hand where he is grasping hers. He is speaking too fast for her to process; he can see that in her ductile gaze as it pulls back to him and there is so much happening in and around them, so goddamned much competing for their attention but she's inhaling, swaying yes but her hand tightens in his and he can feel the way she pulls on his strength to steady herself. The act of will, too, that it requires.
Sera is staring at him then, her mouth open, breathing out these sharp, hard little pants and she knows people are coming, rushing, she can see them behind him, framed into a smear of movement. What happens is that time is dilating the way her pupils have. They are standing in a hallway and the hallway is just stretching a few centimeters longer, isn't. Hardly noticeble except for the way other people are moving in slow-motion now, are being drawn-through-time and it feels like one of those light-speed effects in a third-rate sci-fi show. Or something, god. Everyone else in stop-motion and the two of them framed, so briefly, in their own little bubble of time.
Enough time for Sera to reach over and clasp his hand with both of hers and hold on tight. Enough time for her to brace both elbows and tighten her grip in a brief, ferocious sort of communion. Enough time for her to at least begin processing his exactly what he's saying to her rather than merely getting herself hung up on the scariest pieces of it. Like fucking sedation. Her breathing is more controlled now, deliberate and harsh, and her muscles are taut and stiff and shaking from excess adrenaline, but she's nodding to him, her own eyes absolutely fixed on his as she struggles to listen, to breathe deeply, to find a way to get herself through.
Sera sits down heavily on the hospital bed.
"Okay," she is saying to him, "o - okay. Okay." He can tell that she means it, and what it costs her to mean it and how important he is to that meaning. She's listening to him, like playback, see? She's catching up with him, getting it finally, "Okay. Okay. Okay."
She does not let go of his hand, not with either of her own. She's still just holding onto his one hand with her two, her thumbs braced tightly together, nodding to him slowly, steadily, as time starts to move more normally around them, and all those noises that had become strange, attenuated, drawn out like taffy are resolving themselves as they slide back into ordinary time.
Sera's nose is starting to bleed.
--
It hardly matters, now. They will do this like normal people.
She is getting out of here.
He will remind her how to breathe.
[Many, many rolls. First:
mnemosyne @ 6:13PM
Get it together phobia/WP roll.Roll: 5 d10 TN7 (2, 3, 4, 5, 8) ( success x 1 ) VALID
Samael @ 6:13PM
Witnessed!
Second:
Serafíne @ 7:21PM
Alright. Time 3. Vulgar with witnesses. Difficulty: 8. -1 (specialty focus); -1 (specifically liminal - stretching out the threshold of time for reaction); -1 instinctual use of quint); +1 fast casting.Roll: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP] VALID
Denver @ 7:22PM
'Sup, Tithe.
Serafíne @ 7:27PM
Annnnd, extending, once. Same mods (spending another quint.) Difficulty +1.Roll: 3 d10 TN7 (1, 3, 8) ( success x 1 ) VALID
Serafíne @ 7:29PMParadox.Roll: 4 d10 TN6 (7, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 4 ) VALID
Serafíne @ 7:30PMSoak please soak.
Roll: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 8, 9) ( success x 2 ) VALID
Tithe @ 7:31PMWITNESSED! ]
SerafíneStrangers break in a wave around them. Sera sits in the hospital bed. She refuses to lie down. She refuses, steadily, to be hooked up to any new machines. She smears away the blood trickling from her nose two times and then three. It comes back each time, though slower than before.
She refuses interventions and refuses medications. Her head aches. She tells them - again, and again, and again - that she wants to go. She will not spend the night. She will not be kept here. They will not keep her. She holds Hawksley's hand as long as he will hold her own and insists as many times as they require her to do so that she is competent and aware of their recommendations and of sound enough mind and body to sign herself out, AMA. Against Medical Advice.
Every time some new stranger comes in to see her her hand tightens in his. Every time they leave, it relaxes again.
She does not let go.
HawksleyThis is not a side of Hawksley that even exists. Didn't exist until he got here. Actually: didn't exist, in Sera or Dan's universe at least, until Sera started yanking things off her skin and out of her arm. This is the side that stops making quips to make light of her suffering -- yes, that man was there after Hydra and was there up until a minute ago -- and holds her hand, telling her not just that she is going to get through this, but how. She is going to breathe, and she is going to sit down.
This is the side of Hawksley that, as people are rushing into the room and seeing that she's done what she's done, feels Sera's magic in the air, stronger than ever before, and sees her nose start to bleed, and simply grabs several tissues from the box by the bed, wadding them up and drawing them to her nostrils. He doesn't wipe. He holds, applying firm but surprisingly gentle pressure, even though some of the only nosebleeds he's ever had have been from getting punched... by a human being or by the universe itself, as in Sera's case.
"She's phobic of hospitals," he explains quietly to a nurse who is taking Sera's arm, if only to wipe blood off of it, sterilize the hole where her IV was, lay on a cotton ball, and cover it with tape. The nurse is trying to figure out WTF and also is too tired for this BS and Hawksley's tone is soft because he's sitting next to Sera, who is phobic of hospitals yes he can figure that one out on his own thanks Dan because 'hates' hospitals was not exactly the right word to choose there especially with someone for whom language is so vital, so necessary, so precise when it matters. But his tone is also a warning, a privileged man's way of telling the other man: shut the fuck up.
When the tissues are soaked, Hawksley tosses them away, brings another wad, keeps holding them to Sera's nose with one hand, the other locked in her grip. He'd rub her back if he could; maybe Dan does.
Other than that, he does not need to advocate for her. She does that herself, and he is quietly very proud of her, given the way that her hand seizes his and she tremors all over every time someone comes in. But Hawksley is this other person, who does things like occasionally make sure his breathing is steady and audible so that when she forgets to breathe deeply she hears him, hears him beside her doing that, remembers, inhales, just as importantly: exhales. Who does things like hold tissues to her nose until her arm is bandaged and she can take over for herself. Who does things like hold her hand, sundrenched and containing a wild freedom that she currently does not otherwise feel, because Hawksley would never let anyone behead him and Hawksley could not truly be caged even if held in iron bars and Hawksley's dreams are always of flying.
He holds the tissue to her nose again so she can take her hand and sign herself out against medical advice. He throws it away after; the bleeding has slowed and almost completely stopped by then. They are left alone for Dan to help Sera put her clothes back on, Hawksley helping her remain standing. And then they leave.
--
Outside. Dan is holding the box of tissues Hawksley swiped from beside the hospital bed. The inside of Sera's elbow is bandaged, her scalp has steri-strips across the wound there, she has raccoon eyes from her concussion, she's in her own clothes, she's in the car she hasn't been in since Hawksley took her to Vegas, and Hawksley is putting his foot down that she and Dan are going to sit in the back seat.
"It's safer," he says, which it is, and he sounds like he's already gearing up to be argued with.
SerafíneShe's phobic of hospitals.
It doesn't sound so terrible when he says it, plainly and quietly and without judgment, to the nurse tending her arm. Dan's watching them, Sera more than Hawksley, and probably has his mouth open, his shoulders drawn back with the first current of an indrawn breath to maybe correct or soften the statement with the artful lie Sera always uses. Hates. The privilege and the warning and the warning of privilege in Hawksley's voice, though. That breath goes unspent, that word goes unsaid.
Sera, somewhere in the back of her mind, hears him too. Glances up to take in Hawksley's avian profile and it is a bit comical because they are still rather tangled up. She's holding his hand and he has his other arm abducted across his body to hold the tissues to her nose. But still, a brief, drunken sort of survey. One of those rasping, I-can't-breathe-through-my-nose-right-now breaths and her eyes against his profile. And thinks through all that that when he says those words: plainly and quietly and without judgment, it doesn't sound so bad.
--
Outside, bright and sharply cold and Sera in all her own clothes except for the shoes, which no one, including Sera, believed she could manage, concussed as she is (the nurse who cleaned and bandaged her arm brought her a pair of fuzzy pink sock-slippers, the sort with nubby bottoms distributed to every inpatient in the hospital so that they can shuffle safely up and down the ugly, impersonal corridors, one hand on the IV pole, the other threaded through some orderly's arm) but she has something on her feet and something wrapped around her shoulders and the whole effect is that of a refugee rather than the priestess of debauchery, the divine celebrant, the bacchante that she is, but never mind that. There is always morning and there is always the morning-after, there is always flotsam washed up on the shore after the storm, and sometimes she is that, too. Somewhere the horizon is seamed with light, the early promise of an aching, frozen dawn and the monolith of the hospital is both behind them and Behind them and Sera is taking her first genuine non-terror laced breaths and as that overwhelming fear recedes, seeping in behind it, the quiet, echo her new-found power as she starting to relax into an exhausted sort of afterburn.
The morning air is crisp and bitterly cold and their breath turns to fog every time they exhale. Dan has an arm around her waist and he's still carrying her jewelry and her shoes. The goddamned hospital is behind them and she's out and she's free and some band inside her is snapping taut, this clean bright break. Sera leans into Dan, a quietly grateful shoulder-bump, and then Hawksley: insistent Hawksley opening the back door to the dark SUV: Sera breaks free of Dan's support and she insinuates her arms between the Hermetic's arms and his torso, and his ridiculously expensive down coat makes that slippery, scissoring noise that ridiculously expensive down coats make and maybe it is still unzipped so she can feel both the strength and the brilliant, soaking warmth of his body and his magic as she hugs him and lays her cheek against his chest and then turns her head to kiss him, at the center of his breastbone, where it feels like she can taste his heart beating, still.
Sera lays her head against his chest and knows that she she can bite off the forward movement of the universe, that she could snap the course of time between her teeth.
But she doesn't: she just inhales him, and nods her exhausted assent to whatever the fuck it is he is telling her. Squeezes him tighter with her stupid skinny arms. Maybe she gets some blood on his cashmere that Collins will be tasked with getting out. "Thank you. I just - " What the hell else can she say? She's leaning against him, then, not as if she needed his strength to remain standing, but as if they shared the right to wrap their hands around the axis on which the earth spins and twist it the other way.
"I'd like to come home with you, tonight. Okay? Hogwarts?"
She looks just terrible, the bruised eyes and the head injury, and she smells like a barbrawl and her voice is a bit occluded and she has one of those cheap hospital blankets pulled over her shoulders for a bit more warmth and she is both still-drunk and punch-drunk and when she sleeps again, this time, she is going to sleep for a hundred million years, but now she's letting him go all not-really-docile-but-we-will-pretend-that's-what-she is and as she peels herself away to climb into / allow herself to be handed into the safer back seat of the SUV her left hand skims down his body and around his waist and catches there, index finger through an empty beltloop, her thumb on the button of his expensive jeans.
And notes: "You forgot your belt." as she climbs in, and Dan after her see? No argument in sight.
HawksleyYeah, Sera. Saying my mother is in a madhouse is pretty terrible, even if he used a euphemism and even if he didn't tell Sera that whole story, even if she doesn't know yet just how terrible it really is. Saying he loved someone and fucked it up, oh boy did he fuck it up, that's pretty terrible. These are things that, whether Sera knows it or not, he has some agency in. He had choices. He doesn't figure she chooses to be scared out of her mind. He doesn't figure it's something she's at fault for, something she has to regret. It's just something that sucks.
It's not so terrible, though. There's nothing to judge. Can't be that bad.
--
Outside she's breathing better and the sun is coming up, and Hawksley is smiling because IT'S A BRAND NEW DAAAY or something, even if it's fucking freezing outside. Even if the sky is such a pale, dim blue that the sunrise only makes it seem colder. He puts his hood up; it is cold enough that you do this. He is hurrying them a bit to the car, loathing the temperature.
But no, Sera has to hug him. And Hawksley has to let her. And he pulls her into his coat with him for a moment, because she's going to die of exposure if he doesn't or something, but somewhere in there he stops rushing her. He puts his hand openly on her back, trying to remember how to feel the strength and power in that small frame of hers rather than letting his mind get hung up on just how small she is, how seemingly fragile. He closes his eyes and senses it again: something different in the air around her, a change. An increase.
"Stop that," he mutters, ineffectively and pointlessly: "you're going to get blood on my cashmere."
Which she doesn't, actually. Her nostrils have some caked, dried blood turned black around the rims but otherwise it's tapering off. Her snot will be pink next time she blows her nose. She's fine. His cashmere is fine. His cashmere is replacable. These are the things he's focused on, physical and immediate, when she thanks him. He opens his eyes for a moment, then closes them, and lets her embrace tip him a little bit against the natural flow of reality.
Lets it make him ignore the cold and the exposure and blood on her nostrils. Little things like that.
"Of course," he tells her, before she can even say Okay or Hogwarts. He smiles, more fondly than he would like to believe he does right then, looking down at her half-buried in his coat and entirely subsumed in his arms.
He is thinking of all three of them sharing a bed and getting Dan something to wear that isn't stained with blood and tequila and getting Sera something to wear that is warm and baggy and shapeless and they'll all curl up and doze until evening falls again, or Dan and Sera will, because Hawksley will get up and be in the sunlight. Hawksley will eat his assorted fruits and his wheat toast and egg white omelette and go work out, using a few morning hours to perfect his body, using the afternoon to perfect his mind, while, he hopes, Dan and Sera sleep comfortably nested in his bed upstairs.
He is not entirely comfortable with the fact that he thinks of this, or that it satisfies him so deeply to think of it. So he casts it out.
You forgot your belt, says Sera. Hawksley smirks and gets in. They all get in, shutting out the cold, turning on the car, flooding warmth into the heated seats. He looks at her in the rearview.
"I didn't forget," he tells her. "I thought it would cheer you up."
It's a smirk. And then it's a smile.
SerafíneHawksley's muttered complaint is absolutely ineffectual. It just makes Sera draw in a quick, sharp breath that is meant to be a sniiiifff but is more through the mouth than the nose and sort of nuzzle up against him more closely, further endangering it. Fortunately, his cashmere is both safe and replaceable.
--
In the Mercedes-or-whatever Sera is being Sera, sitting as far forward as she can in the back seat and sort of curling up around the headrest and resting her chin on the spine of his seat so that she can meet his gaze in the rearview with her own bruised and blackened eyes and returning that smirk with one of her own which is leavened really so it crawls all self-aware and ironic across her mouth and her fingers are in his hair and she's watching him in the rearview and then her eyes are dropping from his and she's looking over the edge of his seat the way you look over the edge of a cliff at the sea. Down the semi-obscured line of his body, which is mostly obscured by his coat and the way it puffs open and is compressed closed by the cut of the seatbelt across it and his hair and his profile in her periphery and the smear of morning light across the windshield and the lovely leather warmth of the heated seat beneath her elegantly-perched ass.
"Are you telling me," and her mouth is rather close to his ear and when he looks back at her she looks like hell and probably sounds a bit like hell but what the hell, there is a quiet note of challenge in her voice, "that you thought that easier access to your penis would comfort me Hawksley Rothschild?"
Well, she sort of bats or tips her uninjured temple against the headrest of his seat and holds onto the question for a bit of a moment while poor Dan is trying to get her to sit back so he can fasten her fucking seatbelt,
"Well," Sera concedes, as she inhales him with her mouth sort-of-open like a fucking cat scent-tasting the air rather than her nose because: Paradox. Sinuses. Crusted blood, et cetera. Still: that inhale, and her eyes on him. " - you're probably right."
Then and only then does she accede to poor Dan's ministrations and sit back and allow him to buckle her in. Leaning back into the warm embrace of the heated seats, the blasting heat from the registers, all of it. Giving in, by lazy degrees of lowering lashes, to each and every layer of exhaustion and injury and expenditure and also that rhythm there is on the road, in a car, where the glass is cold and the interior is warm and the world is rolling by.
--
Sera is asleep by the time they get back to Hogwarts. Maybe the trip back took longer than the trip out. Maybe he's more careful. Maybe someone warned them about concussions and nausea and the possibility of a brain bleed. Sera is asleep with her left temple against the glass and her mouth a bit open and her nostrils crusted black and she makes a few little snoring noises here and there because NOSE STOPPED UP and Dan has slung an arm around her, of course he has, and a child waking from the end of a long car ride on arrival, steady enough to be steered toward bed, stripped and redressed in footed PJs, but mostly sleep-walking her way through all the usual rituals of bedtime.
They do find something loose and warm for Sera to wear. Some weird long-sleeved cotton shirt or maybe a button-down and Dan steers her into the bathroom for the brushing of her teeth and the gentle washing of her face and the even-more gentle brushing of the dried blood from her hair and the whole time he smells like tequila and still has dried blood stiff on his own clothes and Dan doesn't know that Hawksley was imagining them all three crawling into his bed and nesting there at least until he wakes, like a sun god, during the day -
- but there's Hawksley, tossing out a few possibilities for Dan to wear to bed too and Sera wants him, wants them both, wants - sleepily - everything, so Dan shoots Hawksley a rather wry-and-something-else glance and starts to strip. Shucks his clothes down to his boxers and then the boxers and takes a pair that Hawksley offers him or whatever. That's what Dan wears to bed, and they settle somehow Sera's head against Hawksley's chest and Dan's arm across her body and on and on and on. This warm and sleepy tangle of Dan-and-Hawksley-and-Sera.
Sera sleeps so deeply and so thoroughly that when Hawksley wakes and rolls out of bed to eat his breakfast of fruit and whole grains and eggwhites and vegetables she does not wake and hardly stirs. Maybe she sort of rolls over into the warm hollow in the mattress he had inhabited, where his scent is strongest and his heat lingers longest after he is gone, and does so mostly soundlessly but with enough limb-movement that Dan, who does not sleep as deeply as Sera, wakes a bit and looks up in the morning light, lifts himself up to one elbow and his arms are more tattooed than his chest and back but he has a few there, too. Pieces of script rather than the old-school full-color sleeve work inked up his arms, lifts himself up and stretches and glances down at Sera and drops a kiss to her shoulder and shifts himself closer to her in the bed and watches Hawksley with unabashed appreciation in the sleepy darkness of the bedroom. Quietly, over Sera's sleeping head.
Then Hawksley is leaving, heading off to his morning routine and Dan is giving himself over to sleep again. Folding himself over and around Sera, settling in to spoon, mouth and nose in her tangled hair, a tattooed arm slung across the now-wrinkled Egyptian-cotton button-down in which they dressed her the night before, which has rucked up over the warm curve of her spare hip.
Dan shakes out the comforter again over the pair of them, pulls it and tucks her in and tucks himself in and nuzzles her until she makes what sleeping room she can for him, in and around her body.
Hawksley, downstairs or somewhere: works out his body, and works out his mind.
Dan and Sera: they sleep, and sleep, and sleep.
HawksleyShe nearly gets yelled at for lounging around the headrest like that, even before the car is in motion. He is going to scold her, but he just looks at her a bit drolly, a bit patiently, then glances past her at Dan, poor Dan, trying to get her to sit like a normal person and let herself be buckled in. And Sera, admitting that yes, easy access to his dick is comforting, finally lets herself be folded back. Hawksley just shakes his head, which she may not remember clearly, just as much of this she may not remember clearly because concussion,
unless she decides to rewind time and look it all over again,
and he takes them all back to his place, where dawn is cresting and the grounds look glorious even in the blotchy patches of snow and Collins is already awake, waiting in the foyer, opening the door for them even as they are walking towards it. There he is taking coats and giving Dan a brief once-over and watching Hawksley's face for a long moment. Hawksley has it in his mind to tell both Dan and Sera to take a damn bath, they smell like blood and tequila, but for once he thinks better of his whims. He goes upstairs with them, on Sera's other side in case she decides to topple down the stairs, and she or Dan insist on things like face-washing and teeth-brushing.
Hawksley is not the one who finds them clothes. Collins does that, as Collins does just about everything around here. Collins finds clean pajamas -- legit pajamas, button-down tops and lapels and everything -- for both of them, though they hang a bit off of Dan's narrower shoulders and completely drape over Sera's comparatively miniscule frame. They are warm and soft and don't look like the sort of thing Hawksley wears at all, which is half true: he only wears the bottoms. But Dan and Sera wear his pajamas into that palatial bed, mouths smelling like cinnamon toothpaste. Hawksley lays on the other side in his jeans and cashmere.
Sera hooks her finger through his belt loop as she crashes out. Hawksley idly, without thinking of it at all, strokes her hair and calls her stupid in his mind. Even in his own thoughts, he deflects, and does not always tell himself the truth.
--
He dozes. Some time later, before Dan and Sera are even thinking of waking, he leaves his bed. He flips the covers over the spot where he was to hold in the heat that was previously against Sera, and doesn't notice Dan waking. Doesn't notice Dan watching him stretch, spine arched, shoulders back, until something catches and lets go of him inside. He runs his fingers through his hair, and walks out, and Dan goes back to sleep.
Hawksley eats breakfast alone, not in the antechamber to his bedroom but in the kitchen itself, sipping something warm but not too heavy on the caffeine, eating his lean proteins and bright vegetables and tart fruits. He sits at an island on a barstool while Collins moves around the room, quietly cleaning, his butler's jacket off and his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows. After eating he tells Collins that he should make something heavier for Dan and Sera when they wake -- she likes skillet potatoes, he says with a shrug -- but nothing that's going to end up thrown up all over the floor.
Of course, sir says Collins,
of course.
His routine is already off. He sheds his clothes and goes to the gym downstairs and lets himself go slow, less driven, finding something meditative in the curls and the lifts. He boxes a bit, going rather zen on the speed bag. When he's sweating, he showers in that same gym. When he's clean, Collins brings the massage therapist in from the front door, and Hawksley dozes again for a bit during the hour-long session on the table. He asks Collins after the therapist has left about Dan and Sera, who are still sleeping.
Lazy fucks, Hawksley mutters, and finds himself inexplicably craving a joint.
--
Later he goes to his library. It is not padlocked, it is not warded, it is not magically sealed, it does not have fucking palm-readers or retina scanners, for fuck's sake. There are first editions in there, mundane ones, that are worth as much as any artifact. There is a series of pulp novels from the 19whatevers that, together, contain a handful of secret messages about the nature of the universe and the truth of Prime and its applications upon Matter. But it really only makes sense if you have all 13 of the books, so Hawksley has all 13 books, dog-eared paperbacks that look like they are ready to crumble. He is not reading one of the adventures of Jack Dyson today, though. Whenever Dan or Sera or Dan-and-Sera wake up, Hawksley is reading The Song Remains the Same: The Nature of Time, Backwards and Forwards.
Every chapter title is a palindrome.
SerafíneDan wakes much earlier than Sera. He takes a piss and scratches himself and looks at his face in the mirror and brushes his teeth again and looks down at the pajamas - the actual-factual pajamas like something out of the wardrobe department for Mad-Men, which are probably finer than anything he owns - and smirks to himself and rubs a rough and calloused hand across his close-cropped beard and wanders back into the bedroom and grabs his phone and texts his roommates and settles in next to Sera to hold her until she wakes. He's still there, texting probably, or playing Osmos, or listening to music on rather expensive earbuds pulled from the pockets of his jeans or the small silver tray with his things if Collins decided to clean Hawksley's guests' clothes, as well, when Sera - lazy fuck that she is - wakes hours later.
He can feel her starting to wake and shifts into her and bends over her and murmurs something into her ear to which she responds at first with nothing more than a long, slow inhale.
Hawksley isn't there to hear the quiet conversation they share when Sera first wakes, and he isn't there to see what comes after, but perhaps he feels the lick of her magic someone in the house, supple and subtle and a little bit sizzling. Like licking the terminals of a low-voltage battery.
--
An hour or two later, Sera comes looking for him. By then she has nibbled her way through the breakfast Collins provided for them at Hawksley's direction and suggestion (heavy on the carbohydrates and caffeine, low on essentially everything else) and soaked herself warm and clean in a clawfoot tub somewhere and shimmied her skinny ass back into Hawksley's pajamas - just the top, this time, as the pants have an extra nine inches of fabric flapping about on the floor, all ready to trip her up and the pajama top is anyway more modest than pretty much all of Sera's skirts, perhaps combined - and wandered back out into Hogwarts, through the hallways.
Maybe she sees Collins. Maybe he comments on how much better she looks, this morning. The black eyes from her concussion are much improved, as is the bruising on her temple. The laceration is a quietly angry line beneath the steristrips, but it has done more than scab over, and has already started to close.
This is the Sera who walks into his library, barefoot, without bypassing security because there is no fucking security to bypass, her hair still damp, drying in wet tendrils around her shoulders and darker for it, a hand trailing along the wainscotting out in the hall, rather blindly following her senses to find them. Eyes half-closed, her senses - which are still fucking sleepy nevermind that she's been awake long enough to heal some of her wounds, long enough to take a warm, soaking bath, long enough to eat freshly sliced potatoes sauteed up with peppers and onions, maybe a bit of sausage, served with warm slices of crisp, multigrain toast and probably topped with bit of freshly grated local cheddar. - her senses blown the fuck open the way her pupils often are.
The details of the night before are still fuzzy but she can taste them, sometimes, raw against the roof of her mouth. And Before is so bright and clear she feels it still like a seed inside her, a quickened sort of wonder she has trouble even starting to fully comprehend. She keeps worrying at the middle button in the pajama top with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, but that stops as she comes in; and finds him reading; and circles the room browsing not so much the titles of the books lining the walls, but the aesthetics. The dog-eared paperbacks next to the imposing, leather-bound tomes and everything in between.
Her circuit of the room ends whereever he is.
Of course it does.
Sera slides up behind Hawksley and wraps her arms around his shoulders and neck and drops her mouth to his hair. Spends some few minutes leaning over him like that, not quite reading over his shoulder but absorbing enough of the text that she figures out that the title of the chapter he has just started is spelled the same forward and backward, and Sera is so pleased with herself for figuring this out that she hums her delight against his skin and murmurs her discovery at him, reaching around him to point it out on the page. As if he never would have noticed it without her input.
Then she says hi, and asks him what he's reading.
Probably he shows her.
Maybe he puts her off, to the end of the paragraph or the page or the chapter or the book. I'm reading, Sera.
She doesn't seem offended. Just pads around the room to find a throw softening the back of a leather chair and settles in and draws the blanket over her shoulder and soaks him in.
Samael @ 5:11PM
Go for it!mnemosyne @ 5:12PM
Life 2: Heal Self. Difficulty 2+4 (vulgar without witnesses). -1 specialty focus. -1 taking time.Roll: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 7, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP] VALIDmnemosyne @ 5:12PM
And: paradox.Roll: 2 d10 TN6 (5, 7) ( success x 1 ) VALIDmnemosyne @ 5:12PM
Soak.Roll: 3 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 7) ( success x 1 ) VALIDmnemosyne @ 5:13PM
Perception + AwarenessRoll: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 3, 5, 6, 6, 10) ( success x 4 ) VALIDmnemosyne @ 5:13PM
and that is all I need. :)Samael @ 5:16PM
Witnessed!
HawksleyDown in the library, Hawksley pauses over what he is reading. This is his home. This vast, cavernous space filled top to bottom with finery and emptiness is all his. He would know if an apprentice had their first brush with magic in his wine cellar; he can certainly feel a disciple healing herself on the second floor.
His eyes briefly close. He thinks: Cheater at her, even though the word has a fond flavor in his mind and even though it does not touch her mind at all. That is, after all, what they all are. Cheaters. Any of them who claims otherwise is full of shit.
--
An hour or two later, Hawksley is still in the library. He is sitting in a large leather chair, feet up on a matching large leather ottoman. He is eating an apple from a bowl of fruit set atop a pedestal table close at hand. He hears and senses her coming, though, having heard dimly the sounds of life from the kitchen where Collins set sausages and bacon and skillet potatoes cooked in bacon fat and eggs cooked in butter and a carafe of freshly-ground coffee and things like juice and fruit and toast and so forth, whatever he could think of that two hungover people might need or want. He knows she's up and awake and moving around, so when she moves around into his library,
he lifts his head, a half-eaten apple held rather elegantly in his left hand.
His eyes flick over her. He sees that the bruises around her eyes are missing, and there is color in her skin again. He sees purple and black have given way to yellowish brown, which is in some ways uglier but closer to healing. He glances at her head and thinks she may not need a plastic surgeon after all, and then he looks into her eyes.
There he sees it again, and this -- not the lick of her magic or the sensation of her resonance but this -- confirms for him what he suspected. There is something new in her eyes that was not there before the last time he saw her. He knows what happened, and he does not ask how or why or when or tell me tell me tell me,
and he never will.
--
As she moves about the room, he watches her. He watches the coil and slide of wet hair along her shoulders, his pajamas. He watches her fingers teasing at that button until they stop. He watches her looking around the surprisingly (not at all surprisingly) sun-coated room. It used to have a drawing room on either side, walls that were knocked down before he moved in, making the library one of the largest, longest rooms in his entire house. It opens out onto a veranda, for fuck's sake. And there are things to see that are not books.
This is where he keeps, in a glass case that Collins keeps immaculately clear, a long, straight-bladed athame, nearly a short sord. The hilt and scabbard are golden, the grip formed to look like the goddess Isis with her arms crossed, holding the symbols of her queenship. The guard is made of wings to either side of a large scarab beetle, and its body appears to be at least partially made of peridot. The scabbard itself is covered in a relief of heiroglyphs.
At either end of the long, tall room, there are windows that curve outward. They face West and East, and at each of them, in the enclave created by the curve, there are altars. Not the sort of altars a witch might make, low to the ground where you sit or kneel to lay out the cards or light your candles. They are tall enough to stand at, West draped in deep red, East draped in gold. There are figures with reflective gold surfaces and prisms made to catch the sunlight and perhaps, magically, retain it. There is a broken piece of chalk on the Western altar, a half-drawn circle done on the fabric itself, symbols not quite etched out completely, a few scattered gold coins bright against the red, an empty bottle of red wine lying on its side. To the East there is a bowl of salt to one side with a few black marks in that were once droplets of red blood, a handful of differently-colored and differently-precious stones, a scorch mark in the fabric, a single thick black candle, a deck of Tarot cards. Other items, just as esoteric, if not inexplicable. There are comfortable chairs, though of course Hawksley is in the most comfortable one. There are some tables. There is a thick, large, leather-bound book sitting on the other chair, a fountain pen atop it.
She stops wandering the room. She stops taking in the tall windows, the heavy curtains pulled back, the signals and signs that a fucking wizard lives here. And he has not stopped watching her, and does not stop even when she comes over to him. He tips his head back to follow her peripherally with his eyes as she circles behind him. His eyes close as she leans over and slides her arms around him, kisses his hair. She does not smell like blood and pain and tequila now, just herself, and the shampoo and soap Collins has out for guests, and clean water. A bit like coffee.
Sera, being Sera, tells him that his chapter title is. A palindrome!
Hawksley, eyes closed, smiles. He smells fragrantly of apples at the moment. Her arm reaches out and he touches her there with his right hand, stroking it up to her elbow, then down to her wrist again. It's an incredibly tender gesture, somehow automatic, somehow also alien. He breathes in, exhales, opening his eyes again to twist his head and look at her.
"Hi," he says back, quietly. He opens his hand to her, offering to have her sit with him, perhaps on him. "Come see," he tells her, regarding what he's reading.
SerafíneSo, she starts with the aesthetics of the books, browsing that first wall of shelves, tipping her head back and back and back as her eyes climb the rows.
Gradually - and only gradually - she begins to become aware of both the majesty and the mystery of the room. The dimensions and the sweep, east to west, sunrise to sunset, the boundaries and borderlines of the world. He is watching her; he can see that moment inside her. The way she begins to turn her head and catches a glimpse of the size of the room; its depth and its bredth. That awareness filters into her body and draws her shoulderblades down and her shoulders back and pulls itself up through her spine.
She starts to wander, barefoot, on polished wooden floors, on deeply piled Persian rugs, all-knotted silk. Past the bookcases with their staggering array and variety of tomes. Between leather easychairs that are not quite as easy as the one he has chosen for himself. When she comes to the athame beneath its perfectly clear glass case, oh, she wants to touch and she wants to see him and she does neither. Slips her hands behind her back and laces her fingers together, and quite nearly holds her breath.
Does, in fact, hold her breath, until her body tells her to breathe again.
Sera walks past high French doors leading to the fucking veranda, her reflection skimming over the leaded and patterned glass and circles past the Eastern altar hands still clasped behind her back to keep them from mischief and here she does look back at him, and her mouth is closed and her mouth is quiet and her eyes are shadowed and she is acutely aware that these are the implements with which he incises his name and his will on the universe. That here is the blade and there is the salt and these are the tools with which he dissects reality. Acutely aware of how alien is his practice. How formal; how thorough.
She looks back at him; and remembers in a flash the way he looked one summer night, her first glimpse of him through the crowd at a roof-top bar. She tastes myrrh, resonant and resinous in the back of her throat. Remembers him then and sees him now and returns to him,
her heart beating, as it always does.
---
The tenderness of that gesture catches both her breath and something that is not breath but also lives inside her but it is his quietly clear invitation to Come See that will hook and shred the striated fibers of her heart and Sera's mouth slides through his hair, opening. Her instinct is to set her teeth in things she wants and things she loves, but she forestalls it. She can feel him twisting his head to look back at her and so she's lifting her mouth from his head and opening her eyes as he opens his hand and extends his invitation -
- and she takes it, of course she takes it, settling her hand in his and circling his chair and as he turns her with a grace that would not be out of place in a partnered dance and she starts to sit on the rolled arm of the leather chair, but slides herself onto his lap instead, settling herself so that her legs are rather neatly tucked and she can nestle in the crook of his arm. So that her body moves with every breath he takes and she can see, beyond the book he keeps in hand, the grand sweep of the enormous library as it falls away to the west and east.
Sera is not like to read with anything close to Hawksley's speed or anything like his understanding, but she does come see and she sits and she reads his pages between his hands. Mostly she likes the palindromes, the beautiful strangeness of them, the way she has to sound them out in her head sometimes, the way she feels them curl on her tongue.
Sera is quiet for some time. Hawksley has time to finish his apple; discard or perhaps consume the core. Here and there she glances up, takes him in through the scrim of her lashes and sees him and Sees him and remembers him and Remembers him,
months ago,
as she saw him then: a sky-god.
"Do you think," a sharp pause; her brow constricts around the thought. Which is quiet but which has been rolling around her head like a ball bearing since she awoke today. Which feels pregnant and immediate and bright and mournful in the back of her throat. " - they mean for us to turn into them. In the end."
HawksleyHere are some true things:
Hawksley studies more than he practices.Hawksley almost never uses that beautiful athame.There is a wand around here somewhere; he almost never uses that, either.When she comes over to his chair and he can smell her and hear her breathing he wants to pull her to him, roll her under him.He doesn't.
--
She sits with him, and this makes him happy not in a lazy way or a godlike way but a funny little way that he decides to ignore, or pretend to ignore. His arm folds around her while he reads, and he does read almost supernaturally fast, absorbing information more quickly than she can keep up, but slower than he would if she weren't there at all and if she were not basically snuggled on his lap. He shares that exquisitely cozy chair with her while Dan does whatever, wherever, while Collins cleans up after breakfast.
They both know, in that painful and searing way, that they do not quite occupy the same reality that Sera and Hawksley do. That it is just out of their reach, at least for now. For Collins, perhaps forever, for he has no desire to attain it. He saw what became of young Master Livingston's mother when she --
--
He strokes her arm occasionally where his hand rests on her bicep, through his own pajama-top. He notices her mouth moving as she rolls palindromes around on her tongue, everything the same backwards and forwards. He tells her, between one chapter and the next, that the book was written by a Cultist. The book was written roughly two hundred years ago by a Cultist who was born in the 1960s, who may or may not have been a hermaphrodite, and this may or may not have been a deliberate spellwork or an expression of nature or a backlash from the universe; no one is quite sure.
Hawksley loves these things: the things he knows, the things he doesn't know but can find. He likes to share them, too, and he never really has gotten to before, at least not with Sera. Sera's never been in his library and on his lap before, though. They're always doing this or that or the other: some violence has happened, or they are in some far-flung locale, or they cannot keep their hands off each other. But here they are, now, like this, and he is happy in that strange way that pierces him and,
if we're honest, which we have to be since he is not,
scares the shit out of him.
--
She asks something he doesn't understand, shortly before he was thinking of asking her if she's okay, if she wants to talk about it, how she feels. But he is looking at her, and he meets her eyes, and that's when she asks him what she does.
His brows tug together. "They?"
SerafíneSera sits in Hawksley's lap and feels time between her teeth like ground walnut shells, and feels time against her skin like velcro. See she can bite it off; god she feels the way it sticks to her and the way it wants to move and the way, sometimes, she refuses to let it go. It makes her feel bright and giddy and disconnected and connected all at once.
She is conscious of the space in the room and of his heart beating and of his profile in her periphery and how fucking fast he's reading, and she is not entirely conscious of how much faster he could read right now if she were not in his lap, if his arm was not settled around her shoulders and his hand on her bicep and his other hand, just the one, to hold the book and turn the pages. If he were not pausing on the title pages of each chapter so that she could enjoy the palindromes, she had no idea there were so many of the things in the whole of the universe. The truth is she may not have understood that there were any of the things in the damned universe and she seems to adore them the way one adores things like poems and prayers and spells if one is a person given to believing in anything constructed with the shared human virus that is language.
And she does adore language, the pleasure of it and the precision of it and the imprecision, too. Sometimes she reads and sometimes she does not and when he pauses to explain the history of the book itself Sera listens and clearly enjoys listening. She tells him that she likes the ambiguities in the story. The things that no one knows and the fact that they do not know and all the facts that they do not know: whether the author was a hermaphrodite and whether it was a choice or an accident or circumstance or paradox and she bumps her stupid bruised brow against his cheek
and glances at his profile and sort of nuzzles at him and mentions Orlando and he soon gathers that she means the movie not the book. She hasn't read the book. She loves Tilda Swinton, she tells him.
Hey, don't we all.
--
He's looking at her and thinking about asking her if she wants to talk about it and whether she's okay and she looks okay, doesn't she? She looks like a Sera and feels like a Sera and is leaning a bit back so she can meet both his eyes and at some point she pulled the mass of her blond curls over her left shoulder and her hair is nearly dry at the tips but still damp in the middle. Which he will discover if he puts a hand in her hair.
Sera smiles for him in a way that feels rather like she is smiling just for him and is a bit strange - not strained, just strange - and she would like to show him what she can do now, how she can make a moment hang just on the precipice of resolution all breathless but she's really rather too sober for that sort of thing.
"Them. You know: the people inside us. The things or whatever," and she settles her right elbow on his left shoulder and slips her right arm around his neck and settles her fingertips in his hair in a slow, sliding caress. "Our avatars."
Thoughtfully; musingly. "I think I saw yours, once. Last summer, do you remember? I told you you looked like a god.
"You told me that was a funny thing to say to a guy you were trying not to sleep with."
It was a long time ago.
HawksleyAt least for now, he does not put a hand in her hair. He doesn't inhale the scent or kiss her brow or find where it is damp and where it is dry. He keeps his arm around her while he reads, and she keeps interrupting him but he doesn't so much as frown at her. He doesn't let on that he's being interrupted, which is not because he is good at pretending; it is because he doesn't really mind. It's about priorities; Sera's presence takes precedence at the moment.
Them, she says, the people inside of us, which amuses him because she goes through iteration after iteration of language trying to get to one singular idea that already has a name, as though she's searching for it,
or avoiding it.
Sera touches his hair. His is dry and smooth and briefly brings to mind the sensation of sifting white sand through one's fingers, granular but silken, ethereal and earthly at once. He breathes in deeply as her fingers go through it, and his eyes close for a moment, then open again, watching her through veiling lashes that hang across his vision like a fringe, all soot-dusted gold.
He remembers, but he doesn't say so. His mouth pulls at the corner, and his hand is on her lower back down, where it slid when she changed positions. "What did it look like?" he whispers to her, without answering her original question.
SerafíneSera is more than a bit fascinated by the texture of his hair. She slides her fingers through it, cupping the back of his skull in the palm of her hand, running her thumb through the short strands with this look of quiet, rather intense fascination fixed in her eyes. She can smell the sun on him; the dry, baking heat of the dunes. See them folding away to the horizon, bright, sun-drenched curves and dark, slithering shadows and the blue-white blast of the desert sky.
When he closes his eyes she wants to lean forward and kiss lids, like a beggar's or a saint's blessing. She doesn't. Just shifts her weight in his lap and draws her legs up to curl her knees against the opposite arm of the leather armchair and watches him and takes in, too, the great space of the library around them.
He asks what he asks and she smiles at him and shifts her weight again, this time to lean forward and bring her mouth and nose to his brow. Sera inhales him, open-mouthed, then presses her mouth to his temple, tasting his pulse, scraping her teeth against his skin, the way she does, as if she might devour him.
"You had black feathers," her mouth moves against his skin and he can feel her smiling and there is both fascination and ache wrapped up in the expression. "Instead of hair. Black but not merely-black. Iridescent." Sera drops her chin and bumps the bridge of her nose against his brow, quietly, wholly affectionate. "Like plumage."
The word fills up her mouth and makes her smile because she likes the weight of the vowels and the way it mantles him and she's drawing back to meet his gaze again and it is really a rather Thoughtful Sera Hawksley finds looking back at him. Close enough that if he looks, he can see his own reflection in her eyes.
"Your eyes were black, too. Mostly-black but not merely-black, though I think they were the black of the sky at night, the spaces between the stars, the shadow of the sun and the memory of the moon. You had the head of some fucking bird, of prey, you know? All fierce. Inhuman, and predatory, and your body was the body of a man, ripped and sun-drenched gold and nearly-bare, with this little fucking skirt thing and all this jewelry.
"Here," and she untucks one of her arms and twists and tries to wrap a hand or maybe two around his bicep and considers both her hand(s) and his muscle and then him, "and at your wrists and ankles, too. Dark blue, right? Lapis or turquoise.
"You looked like a god come down to this strange thing called earth on a passing whim. Who was just experimenting with this thing we call gravity." A little shrug. "That's what I saw. Then, it all dissolves in this rush of a thousand wings, and there you were: Hawksley, having a drink with Sid, outlined against the skyline."
HawksleyShe's so delighted by sensation, by language: the feel of his hair and what his sharp gazes invoke, the taste of a palindrome, the unsettling realness and methodical madness of his magic all around her. At worst, Hawksley might call her a hedonist, with bemusement and just the faintest trace of condescension. At best, he might admire her unfettered experience of life, though he would not envy it. They are very different, at the core; she walks a path, ever forward. Hawksley, for all his striving for perfection, does not go toward or away from anything. He is, the way the universe is, the way the sun is. He exists the way the earth does, where the core is molten only become of the radioactive decay of nuclear isotopes, where this long death makes possible the existence of life.
Ancient bones become fuel, become things touched every day. The consuming, raging fire in the heavens makes things grow. Grief becomes an idea becomes a series of words becomes a story that lives outside the bonds of Fact to become Truth, and that story and words and thoughts and ideas and grief live again and again in new minds because they are put down on the carcasses of fallen trees. Life and death are not separate. Time is a construct. Energy and entropy are as intertwined as lovers.
No wonder he soars above the world. No wonder gravity offends him.
Hawksley listens to her, and he knows what she saw even if she does not name it. She bites his pulse the way she often does, and his eyes slowly close and open again as her teeth and lips move away from his skin again. He looks at her. He tells her, going back a few steps:
"I think in many ways, we are them." A beat of a pause. "They are us."
That is closer to what he thinks. Which is another way of saying:
But Sera. I am a god.
SerafíneThat's not exactly what she wanted to hear, Sera. There is something spare and elusive in her expression as he tells her that. Sera meets his gaze, with a brief and painful clarity, and then glances away. There is a quiet little seam written between her rather straight brows, which doesn't ease even as she seeks whatever solace can be found searching the vast space of that massive library. That sense of space; open. The vastness he creates for himself, he carves from the world.
Night has fallen, now. It is dark all around. Maybe a stretch of the sky still retains some remnant memory of the sun, but that is distant and fading and lights are coming out against the distant hills, point by point, like pinpricks.
"She's wilder than I am - " Sera says, confessing, quiet, and - yes - still very arms-length with the word avatar. He knows that's what she means by the invocation inherent in her utterance of something as simple as a third person singular pronoun.
"Wait, no."
This smile like a ghost chasing across her mouth.
"She's harder than I am."
HawksleySay this for Hawksley: he'll always tell the truth. It's partly because he can't lie worth a damn. It's partly because he's fucking cursed. And the fact of the matter is, he doesn't feel himself desiring to lie to Sera the vast majority of the time. Especially when she's cagey, when she's dodging something she doesn't like. He'll flat out tell her it's not a great idea to hide from the world, but that doesn't mean he'll argue with her about it. He won't force her to go out into that dangerous, upsetting world. He is honest; he is not controlling.
She looks at him, she looks away. She looks around his library; he pulls her closer, arms around her. The afternoon went slowly today; the day lazy. Sera just had 'breakfast' a while ago. But the sun is setting now at five, five-thirty. Outside it is less dark than it is aflame, hinting at indigo.
wilder.
harder.
Hawksley tips his head to the side, watching her. "My avatar does not care if you live or die," he says quietly, and he is not discussing some generalized 'you'. He means her. Sera. "He is a deified manifestation of creatures that were once, eons of evolution past, enormous beasts with claw and fang. And he is me, and I am him. I no more deny that core of myself than I deny magic itself."
Reaching up, he feels the ends of her hair between his fingertips, watching her in profile or looking into her eyes if she's turned back to him. "I think they -- how they are or how we picture them -- represent something in us that is true. But not always comfortable. And not isolated from everything else we become and learn in current incarnations. And certainly not the determination of our destinies.
"Maybe," he says, more quietly, "you are wilder and harder than you think."
SerafíneSera's gaze swings back to him when he pulls her closer. Glances against his aquiline profile and is briefly arrested by the contrast between Hawksley-in-focus and the library smeared out of focus and he can feel that arrest in her, the awareness of space-and-time even if it is just in the way she goes subtly but wholly still for a heartbeat,
or two.
Then she's moving again, wrapping her arms around his neck as his grip shifts on her body, allowing herself to feel and to feel him; the rumble of his voice in his chest, the quiet surety, the conviction in his response.
She's close to him now, her head tipped forward, in this cross-hatched profile and there's a certain tension of awareness in her rather sober expression, a liminality, if you will, that feels not like the beating of a heart, but the space between the beats. Her breath comes steadily and her eyes are on his nose and mouth; the scruff of his jaw, the band of tendon joining his jaw to his throat, and she is listening to him and feeling his words and tasting them,
on her tongue and beneath her skin, and she's a Sera but lo she's thinking, and there's a point where her eyes flick up tomeet his and her brows arch all elegant over them and the look is skewing slantward and it feels rather knowing, doesn't it?
This ancient, aching sort of knowing that comes as much from her body as it ever does from her mind, as if everything she ever was and everything she ever will be is written beneath her skin, etched right into the marrow of her bones.
Sera closes her eyes at the end.
She listens and she listens and he has the distinctive sense from her of doors opening, or at least handles turning.
She's leaning against him, then, her ear against his mouth, the fringe of her shaved hair a bit rough against the tip of his nose. Her triangle, close. Goosebumps crawling down her skin when the warmth of his breath hits the hollow beneath her throat.
"I know I am," Sera tells Hawksley. Confesses, really.
Another breath hits her skin and has her shivering, moving rather deliciously undulant against him.
"I always have been.
"Maybe that's what scares me."
HawksleyRight then, he wants her. Not the way he dimly, vaguely felt drawn to her when she was wandering around his library in next to nothing, hair damp. But when she wraps her arms around him and comes closer, presses nearer, desire flares up in him like a match to gasoline. He breathes in steadily though deeply, his hand on her lower back pressing slightly, urging something he doesn't flat-out ask for. Or demand.
All the same, he turns his head to her neck, exhaling against her skin, then kissing her there, right against her pulse, feeling it flutter and throb against his mouth. It turns from a controlled but not chaste, not small, not soft kiss into something else, his tongue tasting her flesh, his teeth raking over her skin. Suddenly, and totally, he wants her.
Not as suddenly, and certainly not as totally, he relents. He breathes, nuzzling her throat while his kiss fades and she admits what she knows about herself, is frightened of. She moves. He does not groan, but it takes effort; he shudders slightly, because he has no effort left to give to restraining his body along with his voice. Hawksley's hand tangles in the fabric of her -- his -- shirt.
"Well, you're a little bit late to the party if it took a seeking to come face to face with that," he tells her, all desire and amusement. He moves the book on his lip to the table beside him, drawing his hand back to wrap both arms around her then, lifting his head to look up at her.
"Ant alhqyqh mn alqdm ela alhajb," he tells her again, the breath of his voice heavy. She may not, probably does not, remember the sounds as they were spoken to her in her back yard. It was summer then. She could taste her pleasure on his tongue when she kissed him, though it would be another month before he was ever again, in any part, inside of her.
This time, though, he tells her what it means.
"You are the truth, from foot to brow," Hawksley whispers. "And the truth is not a soft thing."
SerafíneAt first Sera just accepts that kiss, the movement of his mouth against her throat, over her pulse, as some sort of tribute. Tribute, which is naturally and wholly her due. She can feel the pressure of his hand on her lower back but she absorbs that as she does so many things and remains where she is, curled on his lap rather than drawing herself upright to answer that physical request, and shift her body to straddle him.
And if the moments begin to feel strangely spongy, if the seconds and the half seconds and the nano seconds and the places in between them that have no name because there are more between than any other thing, if those fractional pieces of passing time begin to deconstruct themselves, if they start to disintegrate, or warp themselves, or begin to stick together, well, she cannot help herself. It is not so much her magic yet as the promise of her magic, protomagic, time on her tongue, his mouth on her pulse, and she tastes of salt and smoke and scent and she tastes like Sera and then his teeth,
she likes that, Sera, and her grip grows firm on the back of his skull.
"Bite me again," Sera's telling him as he relents and she's still fucking curled up but he can feel her body shifting, her thighs bunching, the contraction of the muscles flanking her spine as she draws herself more upright and finally rolls her knees over his thighs and and just straddles him as he finally surrenders the book to the side table.
Sera is looking down at Hawksley, who is both amorous and amused, and she's dropping her brow to his and her hair swings forward, half-curtaining their embrace, fragrant and damp and she is going to tell him that she's always late to the fucking party except when she's so goddamned early because no one remembered to tell her that the party wasn't scheduled until next week but something is changing in his eyes and she can see it,
that solidity, that steadiness, maybe that reverence that mantles him when he means to quote someone else's voice.
So she's quiet. So she says nothing.
So she listens,
breathless, not blind,
- and still somehow seeking.
Somehow her hands are on his face. Her thumbs against his temples, her fingers in his hair. She could kiss his eyes, but does not kiss his eyes, because she's still absorbing those words, still breathing them in. Still
thinking, the way Seras think which involves the mind little and the brain less and the body, oh the body, so much more. There is a place inside her where galaxies are being born. Clouds of gas forming nebulae or what the fuck ever, turning into stars. That awareness of expansive, enduring, brindled chaos. Brilliant, sublime, enduring and he cannot see that or sense that or know that. He can hear, though, the way he makes her breathcatch in her throat. Feel the way she responds to him, her breath warm against his skin. The way she kisses him.
Jesus Christ the way she kisses him.
But then she's breaking away, right. Peeling back from him, getting blindly to her feet and leaving him very much by himself in the comfiest chair in the room. Unbuttoning the precise lapels of his pajama top from the bottom up until the garment falls open to frame her naked body. Her breasts, rising and falling with ever breath, nipples taut. The dark triangle of trimmed hair between her legs.
She meets his eyes as she moves, as she starts the deliberate, deliberated work of unbuttoning, her eyes drop rather quickly to his lap and he knows - assuredly her knows - that she means for him to feel that too.
Sera does not care where she's going. She does not give a fuck what's behind her. She just walks backwards, heedless, without a glance, until she runs into something - it hardly matters what.
Expecting him to follow.
HawksleyShe takes the kiss as tribute, and so be it: that is, in part, what it is. That and the words, spoken like a mantra, spoken like a liturgy. They would not have been out of place upon her altar.
Hawksley is told to bite her. He makes a sound, mostly breath, and this time it is not a scrape of his teeth on her body but his mouth opening, his teeth pressing to her skin, gently at first. He licks her, tastes her salt then, and then his teeth sink in more firmly, finding a space where there is meat and muscle beneath her skin to hold her. His hands run down to her hips to pull her closer when she finally straddles him, when his book is gone but not forgotten.
He has no idea what she thinks, or what she sees in his eyes. His chosen form of magic has never been overly concerned with the minds or souls of others but the building blocks of the universe itself. So it is rather simple for him to ignore what might be there, and to ignore what might be in himself, while he touches her, running hands up that shirt dangling off her hips. While he speaks to her: recites, whispers.
She kisses him, and he closes his eyes again, sinking backward, holding her on him, thinking of rolling around right here on the leather. She breaks, though, pulling away. Hawksley resists, but barely; she slips off his lap to stand. She reaches to start disrobing; he breathes in and watches, but not passively. No, Hawksley gets off the chair, walking toward her, and so that backing away happens sooner, the unbuttoning simultaneous, the tattoos and skin and everything, everything revealed. Hawksley follows her then, tugs the shirt the rest of the way from her arms, steps into her and wraps his arm around her waist before she backs into a globe on a stand. They are close to the door.
He reaches out with his other hand and closes it.
--
The library is still expansive, but now it is growing dark. There are no lamps on. But then: there are no nearby neighbors to peek in those tall open windows.
Hawksley picks Sera up then, from where he grabbed her to stop her from backing into a globe of the world. Maybe she wraps her legs around him; he'd like it if she did. Maybe she's kissing him again when he carries her back to that heavy leather armchair, still warm from their bodies. He's certainly kissing her when their hands get in each other's way on their path to undressing him. Hawksley lets her get him naked, too; he has that much patience, for once, even though he's turning his head and licking the side of her breast as she's pushing his jeans away.
They'll probably have dinner together with Dan tonight, here in the house; Collins is planning for it. They might go out, if Sera wants to. They might stay in, and they might let Dan go home or set him up in a guest room. They will talk later, whether tonight when he's kissing her shoulder in his bed or some other day, weeks from now. They will talk about what really happened to her, inside of her.
But for now, he kisses her neck when he enters her. He holds still, panting against her skin, just to live there for a little while, surrounded by that sensation. It's not until he begins moving in her that he bites her again, holding her shoulder in his teeth, muttering to her to hold onto me. wrap your legs around me. that's it. that's --
Even he, afterward, is surprised at how slow it was. How it was almost lazy, stretched out as though by magic though he didn't feel her manipulating time. How he had to hold onto the armrest of the chair, gripping it hard with his hand, while she came, so that he wouldn't lose his mind. The things she purred to him as it rippled through her, telling him
to follow.
