Seeking

Serafíne

"I wanna go someplace."

Not really morning, or something like morning. Her morning and it is September already. Somehow she slept away the first few days of it, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the shade, sometimes swinging in the hammock in the backyard of the blond-brick house at 719 Corona Street. Edging a toe now and then onto the teak-wood frame to send herself a-swinging again. Something cold cradled on the concave sweep of her stomach in the heat of the day. Something warm when the high-plains chill crept in at night.

The roommate are out. Dee caught an extra shift at the bakery, strange how many weddings there are in September, and Rick's moonlighting at his friend's comic book store, why not? Sera is curled up in one of the straight-backed chairs at the kitchen table wearing a worn-thin Echo and the Bunnymen t-shirt and panties with an afghan wound right-round her legs. Has her leather journal open on the table in front of her but she's mostly doodling and drinking tea and tap-tap-tapping her pencil against the wood, then the paper, then the wood, then the paper.

"We could go to Estes Park. Spend a few days camping and hiking before the first snow falls." Dan smirks there at the end, just a tiny bit though because really: one never knows. "I heard Vita has more of those shrooms you were raving about."

"Naw. I want an ocean beneath me. Let's go to Thailand."

--

Why the fuck not?

That's how they end up in LAX two days later, Sera wearing sunglasses so large she looks vaguely insectoid, an arm looped through the crook of his elbow. He has charge of the passports, she's got a skull-studded clutch slung cross-body by a gleaming chain and a plush panda-bear backpack, because fuck you, and another eighteen hours or twenty hours and somehow it is tomorrow or yesterday, because certain lines were crossed, and they are checking into a beachfront villa at an exclusive resort in Phuket. He tries not to think about the luggage fees or the cost of the first class tickets or the work schedule he had to rearrange in order to come with her ("five days, Sera. tops.") because he's not like certain Hermetics with whom she used to travel. Can't disappear for a day or a week or a month on a whim, chartering a private plane to take him wherever the fuck he wants.

As self-directed and fulfilling as his work is, Dan still has a fucking day job. Obligations, expectations. Responsibilities other than her.

--

But god the elegant dislocation, the maddening colors of the ocean, the rhythm of the ocean, the warmsand between his toes. The disconnect between the lush chaos without and the understated serenity within. Everyone assumes they're rock stars. Or, well: she's a rock star. He must be a member of the band.

--

She's the one who's sober. He gets smashed, pretty on the regular. Starts this flirtation with a British architect working in Singapore that first delirious night they get there that turns into one of those torrid vacation affairs for the three remaining days of the architect's Phuket vacation. The dude's name is actually Eustace though he doesn't look like a Eustace, not at fucking all. Sera's lovely, indulgent, strangely reserved right but: happy for him. Drinks tropical green-tea smoothies on the beach, soaks up the sun, topless. Turns golden.
Has all of her bikinis tangled together in a twee hard-sided hatbox and only ever untangles the bottoms.

--

Then the architect is headed back to Singapore and there's another day or two before their return tickets and Sera tells him she wants to rent a scooter like the locals and head inland, head upriver. Hit Bangkok or something, see some goddamned temples and he points out that none of her goddamned luggage will fit on a scooter, does she remember that it took three luggage carts piled precariously high to get them from the baggage claim through customs?

What the hell are they gonna do with that shit?

Eh. They can leave it.

She rented the little villa for a fucking month.

--

"Fuck, Sera. I said five days, tops."

--

He packs a green army duffle he brought along for dirty clothes, she packs that stupid panda backpack, which fits more fishnets and leather skirts and short-shorts and tees than you think. Wears her combat boots and her cropped leather jacket and that's how they get back to Bangkok. Two days in a cheap rooming house near the nightmarket, windows open, the thrum of the crowds constant, that slow-drone of neon from the clamor of streetsigns outside. He's pretty sure that foamy red soup they had was blood. Sweet, lemony raw fucking blood, and god knows what the Chinese liquor they served along side it. Smelled like feet with the raw kick of rubbing alcohol that sent the whole world tumbling, end over end over end.
No idea what came next or how they ended up back in the rooming house, but he's pretty sure that Sera and magick are the reason he didn't wake up with the world's worst hangover the next day.

--

She practically pushes him into the taxi, come morning.

Kisses him on the temple, tender.

"Go home, get your work done. I'll be fucking fine. "

"Be home soon."

"Five days, tops."

--

Two and a half hours later, he's back on a plane as it banks and climbs into the sky, Bangkok scattered beneath him. That same sense of dislocation, though everything seems emptier, right? grayer now. After all, he's alone.

honest gods

Though the night markets maintain their posts through the daylight they are shells in the wan gray of a rainy season afternoon. Tables bare of wares and the foot traffic diverts itself to find the places still open. Roasting meat and half-dressed women swarming out in the streets and the languages all swarming themselves little songs all dressed as transactions and Sera can hear the world going on whether she returns to bed after Dan leaves or whether she mills around her room deciding what she wants to do with her solitude.

Buses chug down the road beneath the window. Temporary neighbors return home long after late and their voices laugh out in the corridor.

Can she remember the last time she was hungover? Is she hungover now? She does not lose time. She is time.

When she opens her eyes the next time maybe from a nap maybe from a groan maybe from a blink the world outside her room has not changed. The night market still slumbers. Holds its breath even holds onto the promise of what dusk will make of it but the sounds of the city the buses and the bicycle bells and the soup made of speech all of that comes to her as if through a curtain. Not muffled. Out of focus. Bleeding away and soon to leave her world exsanguinated.

On the other side of the door she can hear two voices but not their words. Just as muffled as everything else but constant. Steady.

She cannot feel her hands. The time on the bedside alarm clock is LED and red but she cannot make out the numbers. They all blur together.

Serafíne

That was an early flight or a late flight or god-fucking-knows but there was sun and strange-bare-streets. An old man sweeping the sidewalk with a palm frond. Last night's mascara smeared beneath her eyes made her look like a raccoon, some little fucking bandit. She caught a glimpse of her reflection against the bullet-proof glass of the clerk's enclosure on her way back and then back in the room sat for a few minutes at the open window, one bare leg tucked elegantly beneath her, forehead against the window frame, attention drifting as she watched the gray-morning world drift by, not-thinking, simply be-ing.

Until she had to pee.

--

Gets up, pads to the bathroom. Empties her bladder, washes her hands, scrubs her face clean.

Does a shot of something, who knows what it is, then grabs a bottle of filtered water and crawls back into bed. This bed: a strange bed, the world all around. Buries her head in the gray, deflated pillows and slides back into sleep.

--

For a while.

--

"Mmph."

Makes that noise when she wakes up in maybe the exact same posture because she likes making noises, we were meant to be and to sound and to listen to the hum of the organs in our skin. Cough and scratch and startle-awake (whatisthis/whereami) except she's listening and aware and Aware and alive to shit and the world looks like it did and feels like it did and breathes like it did and bleeds like it did before - right?

Wrong.

Erect in bed she listens like this to her heartbeat and watches the frame of the window but only from its periphery. Glances at the clock, looks away, rubs her eyes with those numb hands. Looks back.

Breathes in, a little sharper now, her heart beating and slides out of bed. Bare feet on the dirty tile. Takes her three seconds to pull on her garter belt and shimmy into her leather skirt, another two to pull on an old concert tee.

The voices outside the door.

She grabs her combat boots and thigh-high stockings but doesn't pause to put them on, just kinda sweeps them with her like she's going to manage it while hopping on one foot and stumbling own the stairs.

Never was the sort to look first, she always just leaps, right? But there's this moment when she's in the little alcove, the little vestibule, spine sharp against the wall and hands too full to reach for the knob so she drops the boots and pulls on the stockings, one by one. And she's listening not for words outside but the rhythm of her heart in her chest, all the strange little noises her body makes. Then she picks up the boots in one hand and reaches for the knob with the other.

Opens the door.

honest gods

All of the light has left the corridor.

The thing about her corridor and the thing about the absence of light: this is not an internal structure. The rooming houses this close to downtown are many of them open-air structures not unlike cheap western motels with airways connecting all of the rooms rusting wrought-iron rails meant to keep the drunk and the uninhibited from tumbling off the first or second floors to make a mess down below.

When she steps out onto the corridor call it an airway when she steps out onto the airway the concrete is dark as night for the fluorescents are off as one would expect the fluorescents to dim themselves in the daylight and she can see the grayness of day beyond the airway but the sun's light does not penetrate a dense and unseen curtain drawn across the railing.

She opens the door. Warped perception. A yawning sensation perhaps. Everything shifting sideways a bit. The voices reveal themselves to belong to two figures that are not right outside her door as the decibel level ought to suggest. If she stands still long enough her eyes will adjust to the dark. If she does not stand still she has her other senses.

One of the figures is tall and solid. Dark in wardrobe and dark in coloration but not dark in spirit. Somehow Sera knows this. This figure wears a watch on one bare wrist but she can make nothing of what it says without light. The other tall as well but not so tall as he. She does not need height for what she seeks. Darker skin and leaner more powerful limbs and her hair hangs in thick healthy ropes around her shoulders. Gold bands around wrists and biceps have no light to catch.

It smells like loam out here.

Will she follow? she asks. Sera hears it in her head. Her ears have nothing to do with it. Underwater telepathy.

Sera cannot hear the words he supplies in answer. Only that he answers.

The bands around the woman's wrists and arms change color in the darkness. Transforming. She plants her hands on her wrists and Sera cannot see her eyes but she can feel the shift of her gaze as she turns to look at the Cultist in the dark.

Serafíne

It smells like loam out here.

Last night it smelled like cat piss and rotting cabbage and that sort of vomit that is mostly-alcohol and patchouli and pot and roasted fish and lemongrass and heavy, resinous incense and diesel fuel and rust for some reason a bit like coconuts, god knows why, but mostly like cat piss and rotting cabbage.

Now, it smells like loam.

And here's Sera coming out of the room into the airway carrying her boots but already shifting her grip to start to step into the first one as she hip-checks the swinging door open when it tries to closer itself on her, inhaling in a way that has her perk her neat little head like a hare that has caught-scent of a whole damn field of carrots even as she stomps her way into the first boot. The second.

Nothing elegant about the way she fumbles her way through tying the long laces while walking down the breezeway toward them but there is something: eager about it. Lively, sort of clattering, and then both boots are on her feet and tied enough that they will stay on and she is not likely to fall over the laces and she's no longer half-bending over but rising upright, reaching to pull her curls back from her face. Somehow she always has an elastic band when she needs one. That's not even magick, it's just the kind of girl she is. So: ponytail.

--

It's not that she takes specific time to let her eyes adjust so much as the fact that still-getting-dressed gives her that time and she's looking eagerly from one to the next. She makes her heart seize, this little fillips, and he - well.

"Following isn't really my fucking thing, you know?"

Although: right now, she is. Following, right? Striding toward them, wondering if the way is peeling dark-streams and pinpricks of light all around her like it does whenever spaceships wanna go fucking fast in the goddamned movie. Wondering if she has a tail, like a comet.

Which makes her want to wiggle her ass.

Though she refrains.

Will they let her join them? She wants to. Wants to through her arms around his neck, though she's a little more wary of her. Sharper, brighter. The ropes of her hair. The thunder of her own heart.

--

"But I'm pretty down to seek. Where the fuck are we going?"

honest gods

He knew Sera wasn't going to follow.

She knew Sera was here to seek.

Attuned to everything even in the absence of light and Sera knows the way she knows they speak though she cannot make out the sound that an air of acceptance blows out of the female figure's lungs with that question. Acceptance in the cant of her head. Watchful eyes though hidden Sera can feel them on her face. Acceptance sure but in the next beat of the drum in Sera's chest she is moving one bare foot forward to jut herself in front of him. Reduces him to shadow.

Sera does not wriggle her ass. Sera does not throw her arms around his neck.

Somewhere in the distance a young throat screams with a voice like broken glass. Distant very distant and it has nothing to do with any of this.

"Where do you want to go?" she asks.

Serafíne

Yeah, she's sliding out, hipslung. And she never was tall and she didn't pack even a single pair of heels for the trip from Phuket to Bangkok because the first pair she tried the spiked heels looked like they'd tear right through her poor panda-backpack's faux-furry skin. Here she takes up space because she needs to, because she does, because sometimes it feels like something inside of her is the edge of the horizon and the storm beyond it, the bright, mysteriously-lit expanse of it. The strange, elsewise promise inherent in it.

And sometimes she just wakes up and wants a cup of tea-and-whiskey.

And it's all so fucking hard to fathom, that she doesn't really try.

But see: wants a cigarette, wonders if she has them, wonders if it matters, wonders if they would appear if she decided that she wanted them. How physical and how ephemeral and how much does it really matter.

She has gone out ahead of them, see.

She has turned around and is walking backwards with hands in her pockets rummagerummagerummage for the case-and-lighter.

Where do you want to go?

And fuck if she has time to answer it. Or, even really hear it.

That scream in the distance in the very distance that has nothing to do with any of this has her turning, listening, rising to the balls of her feet, fingers curling inward to skim her palm. Another sense of dis/location, a sort of un-doing.
(Gonna call it: Correspondence 2/Mind 2. More mapping than scrying but using the emotion in the scream to isolate the source and get an impression of - where/what?)

Serafíne

Magick Stuffs! Er. Coincidental: difficulty 5. (-1 focus)

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 4, 4) ( success x 2 )

honest gods

Though he speaks in a language Sera understands the words do not reach her. They are meant for the female figure accompanying him and the female is no more of a mind to answer him than Sera is to answer her.

By now he has become little more than the impression of a figure stood in the shadow cast upon shadow by she. The bands around her wrists and biceps taking on a darker cast as if they are absorbing the darkness changing it though the darkness adjusts to nothing else but Sera.

For now the darkness holds.

I thought she was, too, she says.

The effect commences a stitch. Sera can make nothing of its source or strength unless she focuses and tugs.

Serafíne

It is: less that she is not of a mind to answer (she is of a mind to answer, though her answer is like as not to be her almost universal and at-least-to-Hawksley nearly always unacceptable I don't know. Everyone else she knows in this time and this place and this position except maybe sometimes Dan accepts her I don't know, which is often a cipher for her specific brand of bullshit. But hey: Sera does not think they would accept it. Knows they wouldn't.) and more that she is distracted by the scream. Hooked by it.

Caught.

Between.

Feels that like a hook in her spine and a vague, unsettling chill.

There is a sort of bristling about her except she is focused. Pushing. That shout has nothing to do with any of this. She hasn't answered them and doesn't know.

Some piece of her wonders if the door she's been trying to shove her skinny ass through is already starting to close behind her.

The rest of her, though, is everything/nothing.

Everywhere, and no where at fucking all.

(Extending. Dif +1)

Serafíne

Roll!

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (4, 5, 5) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

honest gods

The door is a metaphorical door. No whine of hinges or swatch of light cut through the shadow to tell her that it's opened or that it's preparing to close. A door only present in that piece of her wondering about it. Not even the same door perhaps. The door is whatever she wants it to be.

As Sera focuses on the voice without the voice she cannot fathom into solidness takes its form and he disappears. The she meanwhile works a kink out of her neck and the rolling of her spine rattles little metal bands securing the ends of her braids. Small symphony.

That scream is come up out of the night market. The streets comprising the night market. Empty but not dead. That scream has the strength and character of a woman in distress but she is drunk and Sera can make nothing of the strength or character of the person or thing that made her scream nothing of the trajectory of her distress or the immediacy of it only that there is a woman in this city and that woman screamed once and then fell silent and she could search for others who are screaming but this one particular woman is screaming for no reason other than she is drunk and something agitated her and it is nothing to which she needs attend.

An echo. A blink.

The next Sera knows she is back in her room. She is where she was before she heard the voices. Her boots are where they were before she went to collect them. She still cannot feel her hands. She still cannot make sense of the numbers on the face of the clock by the bedside.

Outside the voices are talking again. The same voices in the same place with a different cadence. A different tone. Still as if they are inside her head though she can make no sense of the actual words.

Serafíne

"Oh my fuck."

--

The strange feeling like a compass needle inside her has become demagnetized. There's no more north, there's just the bath of glycerin in which to float.

--

She wakes up like she woke up before and this time it is: changed. Altered.

A knot of something she cannot quite name ties up her viscera. This time she doesn't reach for her fucking clothes, just the bottle of Chinese liquor on the nightstand, through which the fuzzy, nameless, formless should-be-numbers shine. Stands up with the worn-thin sheets unspooling from her body. Doesn't bother getting dressed. Keeps on going, barefoot, barelegged. Black lace hipsters and an oversized Duran Duran t-shirt with Simon Le Bon's peeling face over her left breast. Every single one of them is wearing a fedora.

Picks up the bottle and unscrews the cap and takes a slug and screws the cap back on. Carries it by the neck as she walks barefoot to the door to her cheap little otherwise-mostly-empty double.

Except maybe there's not a fucking door:

that's what she decides.

That's what she tries to walk right through.

Maybe she just bloodies her nose.

honest gods

If she were a mad scientist or a reality hacker that door may have proven itself no more than a momentary distraction. She could have willed herself through it. That is not the card that Sera holds in hand as she stumbles out of bed for the second time that day or at least the second time within the span of her own cognizance for all she knows it isn't the same day at all but she does stumble into it though she does not stumble into her clothes or her boots. Does not stumble into anything other than a bottle of liquid that smells heavy of metal and rubbing alcohol.

That and the door.

To her credit she does not collide with it hard enough that she cracks the cartilage or ruptures the tiny blood vessels in her nose. No blood splatters the floor. But she does feel a rush of stars and the white-out of her vision. Not enough to stun her really. She could keep moving if she wanted to.

When the door opens Sera cannot hear the click of the latch releasing or the keen of the hinges. It opens and what light she has afforded herself spills gray out into the airway. She cannot hear the voices because they are not speaking. One of the forms crosses in front of the threshold as a shadow and keeps moving. The other is an unknown variable. The other could be behind the open door or waiting on the other side to where the first first crossed. Where they were before.

Light beyond the airway. Darkness contained to it. The only difference now is Sera is wearing nothing more than a t-shirt and underwear. The lingering burn of ethanol in her throat.

Serafíne

"Fuck."

Vulgar, yeah. So she collides with the door that she had briefly decided was a goddamned metaphor, but a door but a whatever, some of that bullshit the counselors always tried to pull out of their asses. Sunlit exteriors, dark shadows within. Blinds slatting in these bands of light. The institutional burn. (Let's explore what the barrier here is to - )

- the barrier here is the fucking door. The barrier here is the darkness and the strange silence and occluded shift of light and dark. She takes another shot right from the mouth of the bottle, still holding it by the neck. Saunters down the narrow dark airway following if not the cadence of voices (because: silence), then instead the strange unnerving deja-vuness.

"I guess I want to go to the nightmarket," she remarks, conversationally, to no-one. Or, perhaps: to Her. "I mean, unless that question was supposed to be rhetorical or metaphorical or like, some kinda songwriting prompt for a vision board, in which case, I have no fucking idea. I was thinking about Wat Umong, too. But if we're doing that now I should probably go put on some clothes."

honest gods

When Sera steps out of the room to address the darkness and the shadows within she sees the taller of the two the male of the two is stepping back into shadow again. As if he has been in motion this entire time. Maybe he was the one who opened the door. It doesn't matter. Sera is talking to her.

Unless Sera is talking to no one. No one is here.

"Should you," she says.

Sera only has two choices. She can stand and talk to the shadow-swathed woman or she can turn back towards the door. With her back to it Sera has no assurance that the door is where she left it.

Serafíne

The shadow-swathed woman then. The man gone, that edge to her, that presence.

And now: blocking her path.

Serafíne stops, just then, on the threshold perhaps. Between never and now, and she could turn around and go back in the room, right. Close the door or put on clothes or find the window and dive out of it, into the street. Crack her head open on the sidewalk. She wouldn't be the first Western girl with half-a-dozen substances swimming in her blood-and-fat-and-sweat who broke her face or at least her leg that way.

Wouldn't be the last, either.

"I don't care too much for shoulds, either."

Studies the woman. Her own eyes dark, ticking back and forth over her features. Hard to tell if she's looking up, or looking down, or eye-to-eye.

"And I don't know if this shit's really real or just real, but either way, I can go now.

"If I need clothes maybe I'll find some on the way."

--

"The last time I saw you, you pushed me off a cliff."

honest gods

Clothes. Neither the fading man or the shadow-swathed woman have any opinion on the state of her dress. One of them is used to seeing her barely clothed. The other is barely clothed herself.

It would be an easy thing to say it does not matter to the shadow-swathed woman whether Serafíne comes or not. The easy thing is not the door through which a person achieves enlightenment. Stasis will kill the hardiest of machines. Even machines require maintenance and upgrades and machines do not bleed but Serafíne is not a machine. She is flesh-and-bone. She would survive the impact if she were to jump out of the window but didn't she turn back time to stop a Quiet-wrapped young man from doing that just a few weeks ago?

Rhetorical questions have no place in this world. She isn't sure if it's real or not. The last time she saw this woman she pushed her off a cliff.

Hard to tell if it's his voice or her's. Either way:

What now, querida?

The light reaches the staircase. The world beyond fogged as the faces of the clocks and the watches and the two figures come to call on her. The motel room door as clear and real as anything she could feel with her hand. If what she wants is realness she can walk through that door sure she still has free will but if what she wants is realness that door will not open once it has closed again. Not into this world.

Serafíne

What now, querida?

--

That's his voice.

No, it's hers.

And Sera stands on the threshold, mussed and half-dressed, bottle-in-hand and nothing else. The door behind her. The fuzzed out world in front of her, spare shoulders set at an angle that is stark and slicing. She has been harrowed. Hollowed. And she watches-them with a slant-wise look, trying to pull the threads of his profile out of the shadows into which he has disappeared.

He makes her feel: safe. Wholly and entirely, safe, in a way that makes her want to cry.

She makes her feel like there are wings being carved from the muscles framing her spine. Like air's leaking out, and light in. So: not-safe.

That's cool too.

--

What now, querida?

Sera kisses Her, if She allows it. Full on the mouth, breathing in, the way you do sometimes.

This neat little shrug, then-and-there.

"Fuck, I guess. Let's go."

Takes a moment then to close her eyes, to center herself. To find a spark, a thread, a tug of sensation. Once it was an iron needle with a golden thread stitched through the meat of her thumb. Now she looks for another thread, spark, sensation, tug, urge. Turns and follows it:
down the airway. Down the steps, maybe. Out into the streets. Out into the city. Whereever it leads.

honest gods

Last time She allowed it.

She is the goddess of transformation. Of change. She takes down dead timber to make room for new growth. Watches over the newly dead as they shuffle off to what lies after life. Bringer of violent rainstorms to keep the rivers flowing. She is praised by the Yoruba and the Guanches and the Lucumí and the Candomblé. People who have seen their lands taken over and their waters staunched.

Last time She allowed it. This time she takes a step back. Pointed sure but this is not the end. A certain turn of her body and Sera can see the sheathe of the machete strapped across her back.

Fuck, I guess. Let's go.

So Sera closes her eyes. That scream again or another scream and she is not listening. She is feeling for a thread that isn't there. No one has stitched a tether to her. She is her own tether. She can go wherever she wants to go. She is time.

When Sera opens her eyes again the shadows have gone. Beyond the airway the entire city is dark but the light has come back into her world. Neon lights a herald of the life come back into the night market and the music come up from tinny transistor speakers and the throng of shoppers native and foreign alike. Laughter. Laughter more than screaming. Someone is still screaming. She will stop eventually.

So: down the airway? Down the steps? Out into the streets.

It isn't going to lead her. She has to know what she wants if she's going to go anywhere.

Serafíne

So. She opens her eyes and the shadows are gone and there's no tug and no thread and no guidebook. Just herself. Her Self, in the filthy airway.

And Sera stands there for quite a long moment, mouth seamed, shoulders tensed.
Alert, waiting. Searching her periphery for the places where the seams of the world are starting to rip. The tick-tick-tick of her eyes. The first pleasant punch of the shots she took from that bottle of cheap god-knows-what-it-is liquor wrapping her spine and warming her belly.

--

So not-out. Not right away.

--

Sera goes quite deliberately back into the room and puts on her goddamned clothes. Among the things she wants is to: not get arrested or picked up by paramedics and taken away by who the fuck ever. Gets dressed. Cut-offs and fishnets and a crop-top. Leather jacket over that. Feet stomped into her boots and the boots laced up. All the shit left in the room bundled back into the panda-bear backpack. Passport and a credit card and some cash in the skull-studded clutch slung over her body. Leather journal and her pens wrapped up with underthings and bikinis and thigh-highs and t-shirts in the panda-pack, with a book of Mina Loy poems. iphone in her right front pocket.

Puts on some lip gloss and mascara and lines her eyes and when she leaves the room is as empty as it was when she arrived.

She isn't coming back.

--

Hot in the city today. She has her hair pulled back. Barters in broken Thai for a silk-screened sarong she wraps around hips and a handful of gum-and-paste bracelets and an old iron ring with a chip of rich red glass in the center as saturated crimson as a burmese ruby. East some khanom krok piping hot from the pan and buys some strange, prickly little fruits on a stem and another bottle-of-booze and some hashish. Drinks three beers in a open-air cafe, two of them sitting on a stranger's lap. Never catches his name, but she didn't really want to, anyway.
Is kinda fucking lit but still manages to make it to the station for the night train to Chiang Mai.
Buys a second class ticket and kicks back, feet up, head cushioned on the panda-pack. Buys some larb and flatbread and luk chub through the open window as they are passing some station, somewhere in the dark. Shares the luk chub with a toddler who gets it smeared all over his face then falls asleep in his mother's arms.

The train lurches and rattles and heaves and shudders and squeals and jerks. Sometimes it stops, for no reason, in the middle of nowhere. Dark land sleeping, stars so goddamned bright in the sky.

Drowses, wakes. Chats with strangers in her stumbling Thai - which is, magick. Everyone has a story.

--

Who-knows-how-long-later (there is: a sponge-bath and a face-scrub and a pit-wash and a change-of-clothes in the cramped W/C and beer and sticky-rice for breakfast and then takes three of those seeds she bought back in Bangkok. the gods only know what they are, but there are already tracers framing her vision as she packs up her toiletries and exits the W/C, mouth all minty-fresh, thank you, Listerine) and she stumbles off the train in Chiang Mai.

The sun's up. She has no idea what day it is.

All these guys on moped and tuktuks lining up to earn a few baht as taxi-drivers. She sees one guy on a bike balancing a wicker cage with chickens on his head, a child on the handlebars and a woman behind him hiking a suitcase up over the backfender. Picks a guy with a little red scooter and haggles for a ride to Wat Umong. Ends up paying four times the going rate and she'll give him an even-better tip on the other end. Climbs up behind him and wraps her arms around his waist and rests her chin on his shoulder. Lets the world warp itself around her, her long hair flying out behind.

Reality-Induced Hangover [In Progress]

Elijah

[Per+alert, pay attention to the road, kid, +2 diff(App4 chick sunbathing is distracting)]

Dice: 6 d10 TN8 (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7) ( botch x 2 )

Elijah

[Dex+athletics- I meant to do that]

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

Elijah

Serafine is sunbathing somewhere in the park.

Elijah had been running, not that he is a particularly adept runner, or really even particularly remarkable in regards to his relative speed, but he does happen to last a little longer than most people would in this weather. He wasn't the kind of guy who would train for a marathon, but something got stuck in his head that made him want to- namely, being stuck in a class about gemstones referred to as "Rocks for Jocks" and being told that there was no way in Hell that he could actually survive running a marathon without tapping out or throwing up. Seeing as how he was never one to settle for being told he couldn't do something, he was out running.

He was running and he'd come across Serafine sunbathing. Now, grant you, he's seen Sera in relative states of mostly dress or dress that rounds up to being clothing but there's a point when you're running or exercising that your brain goes fuck this nonsense, you need to put your energy into moving and not thinking. And eventually, you hit the point where the only thing your brain can process is obscenities and breathing. And in that moment, amidst his running, amidst the appreciation of whatever she'd been wearing and wherever his imagination was going, Elijah failed to notice that there was a park bench in front of him.

Which he ran headlong into.

Tumbled. Rolled, rolled, rolled some more and almost took out a cyclist who happened to be passing on the trail. The cyclist veered, nearly toppling into a tree but, instead, heading straight for the bushes, which made someone making out with his girlfriend (second base, wooo!) squeak the sound that a romantically frustrated teenager can make. The chain reaction was set into motion and Elijah, for his part, was content to sit on the ground and be torn between Serafine, who is sunbathing, and the chaos he caused.

"Hi."

Serafíne

What she is wearing is a cheetah print bandau style bikini top and a pair of daisy dukes, unzipped and unbuttoned, so short that the pockets are visible below the hem of the shorts. Some sort of bikini bottom beneath, slightly mismatched from the top. Her skin loves the sun, absorbs it and reflects it back into the world. She is beautifully tan everywhere one can see, and her dyed-blond hair is brighter for the sun in the sun. Or perhaps the bleaching is recently refreshed.

There she is, sunglasses covering her eyes, hair pulled back, feet bare, flat on the slightly nubby surface of an old white coverlet turned picnic blanket, alone for the nonce. There's a picnic basket at the foot of the blanket, closed right now. No visible evidence to show how much she's still hurting.

But she is.

"Hi."

Okay, moving a little slow as she turns her head to regard Elijah, neatly ignoring the chaos too.

Maybe she's hung over.

"You put on

Serafíne

"You put on quite a show."

Elijah

"They totally just put park benches in random places sometimes, It's a city initiative," or I totally wasn't paying attention to the fact that there was a park bench in front of me and I caused the human equivalent of a five car pileup. He smiles, something bright and shameless, because he didn't have time to be ashamed right now of being just a tad unobservant.

He catches that she's moving a little slowly, though, cocks his head tot he side but doesn't say anything. There's lots of reasons a person could be moving slowly, right? His first thought is that she's moving hangover slow, but then again- has he ever seen Sera hung over? Wouldn't magic kind of negate the need for having a hangover unless one wanted a hangover?

He does get up, grass stains on his knees and he'll no doubt end up with a bruised elbow, or bruises somewhere because he'd actually been making decent stride before the unfortunate meeting with a parkbench occurred.

"But yeah, I... uh... that was completely unintentional. The you can't run a marathon gauntlet has been thrown, once Dan and I went out when I'd had a shit night sleeping and we hiked and just did shit and it was meditative so I figured that running could actually be a good alternative to getting shithoused regularly."

Serafíne

"Mmm." She hums back. Agreement or acceptance or something of virtually everything he said. This hum that is physical and sub-liminal, somehow. Held in the instertial space that always feels somehow beneath her skin but above her body, this framing awareness of the world she carries like a second skin.

"I like to rockclimb. Jim was into yoga in the fucking park. Are you really thinking about training for a marathon? You might want to take up something safer than running, yeah?"

Elijah

"Given my propensity for running into things?"

Serafíne

"Naw. Given the universe's propensity for throwing park benches right in front of you."

This quick skim of her mouth, the briefest flash of her teeth behind glossed lips: perfection.

Elijah

"The universe just knows- Poirots and park benches are natural enemies," he grins, playful, brushes off his knees and checks out the slight scrape on one of his elbows. "I like the idea of trail running. It's running, but through nature. Or those obstacle courses people do? Those seem cool, but I figure why fuckin' climb a fake tree when you can climb an actual tree."

Scoots over, carefully pets her hand for a moment before settling in, comfortable, nearby. He establishes where he is, what the space is, whatever comes next.

"I didn't know you rock climbed," he said.

Serafíne

That draws out her smile again: quick and sure. Almost viciously confident, the slash-and-draw of it beneath the bright, reflective opacity of her dark glasses. Something animal about it, even with the sort of slow-glandular movement that most people assume is the visible evidence of one of those knock-you-on-your-ass hangovers. Maybe an acid hangover.

Elijah pets her hand, which she finds a little bit weird, but doesn't seem to mind, and settles in. Probably on the expanse of that nubby coverlet. There's room for another body, another several bodies, that hasn't been filled yet.

"There's a helluva lot you don't know about me, kid."

Says our Sera, who is older than he is and rough-voiced today, muscles bunching in her stomach as she shifts her body to sort of lean in his direction.

"The idea of it and the fact of it are pretty different things. If you like the idea, fuck. Give it a try. Maybe you'll like the idea of it more than the fact of it. Maybe you'll like the fact of it more than the idea of it. Then you'll know."

Elijah

There's a helluva lot you don't know about me, kid.
"Do I get to find out?" the immediate response. Doesn't seem keen on not knowing something, but is incredibly interested in the idea of finding things out. Sera defies definition, she just is and there's layers. Beyond that, there's delight in his voice, somewhere in his eyes that make them more green than amber and the south creeps in because- well, because. Doesn't need a reason to have origins.

"I think I like the idea of a lot of things, but find myself missing the mark on the actuality of them. I didn't think I'd like camping though, and I fucking love camping so maybe trail running will be like that," he said, paused and grinned, "about a week ago I ran into this one chick and we ended up racing in the forest, she was like this wood nymph- I think she's still in my phone. I figure if trail running is anything like that, I'll like it."

A second, then?

"I'd like to find out more about you, at least. I want to know a person and not the idea of a person."

Serafíne

"If I were you I'd stick to chasing wood nymphs over mere trail running any day. If that girl's in your phone you should give her a call. See if she wants to race through the forest again. See where it leads."

This neat little shrug of her shoulders, mild, incisive, the movement cushioned at the edge of her range of motion because: ow. Ow ow ow.

"Or where it ends."

She looks: up then, and then, away. Back towards the sky where the failing sun reflects in the dark surface of her lenses. Doesn't seem at first to be reactive or reacting to his comment that he wants to know a person and not the idea of a person, except:

"Alright. Ask me any question you want. I'll answer. Anything in the fucking world."

Elijah

Ask her anything?

It's not a moment where the gauntlet is thrown, not something that seems like a challenge- an aha, I can ask whatever I want! moment. Not a triumph, just an offer. He perks up, but for all his delight and eagerness he's hesitant. There's no room for hesitation, though. Not in his mind, at least.

But he hesitates anyway. Any question, and she'd answer.

"What is..." he stops, "is it weird that now that I have the opportunity to ask anything I don't know what to ask?" Laughs because it's disarming, laughs to himself more than anything,. more an exhalation of breath than laughter.

"What do you dream about?"

Serafíne

"Which dreams do you mean?"

The glasses give nothing of her eyes away but oh there goes her mouth, the slow-burn-crawl of it, just at the corners and nothing more. There go her straight little brows, rising into a brief but thoroughly eloquent arch, which is more challenge that query.

"The kind that crawl across the surface of your brain at night, and linger in the morning like a half-remembered cigarette? Or the ones you cultivate yourself, watching the light drift across the surface of a cup of tea, while the world slides by?"

Her shrug is shortened, arrested. The motion inhibited by a deep, dull, healing ache.

Hangovers.

Gotta be.

Elijah

"Like, the ones that pop in your head at night and disappear the next morning if you don't quite grab hold of them fast enough. The this is my aim for a better world and this would make me happy to see into fruition works, too, but specifically I was thinking about the sleeping ones," he tells her.

She's gotta be hungover, he thinks, but he's got delight written on his face and takes her in while she's still processing the day through hazy ouchness.

Has to be a hangover. But, he asks anyway.

"By the way, you want Tylanol or something? I'm pretty sure I've got some in the car."

Serafíne

"That's sweet, kiddo." Wry. This humming awareness in her voice, a throaty affection. "But I don't think Tylenol'll do much for me. I got my ass kicked by reality, not booze."

Neat little curl of her shoulder, then, a herky-jerk motion that stitches the joint back into place and tugs the nubby coverlet as it happens.

"Hawksley once told met that he'd dreamed of flying since he was a baby. You know: taking off, climbing up into the sky, soaring. Not just daydreaming, you know? Night-dreaming too. Night-dreaming first, I fucking think, like this piece of his soul that had to work its way out one way or the goddamned other.

"I never had dreams like that, thought sometimes I'd get glimpses of what-might-be, usually all wrapped up in weird half-raveled metaphors. Sometimes they'd be a little more straightforward - so obviously meaningful that it was hard to let go of even when I couldn't fucking figure it out.

"Last night I dreamt that I was walking through this spiraling cocoon of pearl, holding a baby that was either a person or a six-pack of Monk's Sour Ale, searching for Debbie Harry because I had to return her ant colony, and when I found her, every word we said to each other made sense backwards and forwards, and then Debbie was gone and I was standing in the middle of this road in a place that felt like the desert, right? That sky, those stars, that lonely fucking expanse of possibility, and there was a road and I was beside it, and I was walking because I'd been waiting for someone to pick me up, but he never came.

"So I said: fuck it, and started walking the way I wasn't supposed to go, flipping off the stupid moon."

--

"What about you? What do you dream about?"

Something in her tone - some slanting awareness, perhaps - shades that to mean: when you aren't dreaming about drowning.

Remembers that, Sera does. Is: careful around it, too.

Elijah

"I kinda figured it was something? But if it was something normal I figured, hey, stuff." He tells her, keeps sitting up but eventually halfway through the story concludes that he doesn't like sitting up and looking down at her because it felt a little like he was towering. Screw being towering, there was a blanket, so it was down to the blanket. Back on the fabric, eyes at the clouds until, of course, he decides he'd rather look over at her.

He listens to the dream, acutally kind of laughs a little at part of it, some of it was absurd, some of it was... Well, he could empathize. Maybe he flipped off the moon in his dreams, too.

"I have no idea who Debbie Harry is, is she, like, GReta Garbo but less mainstream?"

--

What does he dream about?

"Mermaids, usually. Or unicorns. Once I had a dream that I was supposed to get married and I was all fuck that so I went into this forest and came across this pool of water and there was a lady in it, so I followed her. Like, I went into the water but the world turned upside down and it wasn't water and I was in, like, Gotham City and I crawled out of a puddle and kept, like, skipping between medieval fantasy world and Gotham City. And somehow I met Batman, but he stole my car because for some reason I had a car.

"The mermaid dreams usually make more sense. Like, you hit the ocean floor and everything glows blue and there's an epic battle with a giant angler fish and sometimes I don't win, and it's not like breathing is a problem? Like, the fact that we're under water doesn't even matter.

"But man, fuck angler fish. Those things are cool and creepy."

--

"Where are you from?" next, casual and curious.

Serafíne

Head tipped back, fair hair rippling, mussed beneath her scalp, caught up in the texture of the picnic blanket, spare shoulders open, that suggestion of attention beneath the dark sheen of the glasses, which is always, somehow - sharper than one thinks.

"Do you think that matters?" The sloe-gin-hum of her voice. "Where a person's from?"

Elijah

"It mattered to me," he said, "if it doesn't matter to you, it doesn't have to. I like knowing where people started, even, y'know, if the concept of people starting anywhere but between the Tigris and Euphrates matters much."

He takes in the details, sideward and lights bathing down from the sky. He could have,f or a moment, forgotten that she was here to enjoy the sun and he was here to ... you know... not run into park benches.

"I guess the better question is: where do you think your story starts. Doesn't have to start where you accidentally popped out."

Serafíne

Her kinda-smile starts as a slice and carves itself across her neat little mouth once again and there is no particular sense of deliberation about its progress, except for the deliberate choice she makes to enjoy even this: the warmth of the sun, the reality hangover, the young man beside her who is both chaotic and strangely precise in the midst of that chaos.

"I have no fucking idea where my story starts," of course, she counters, this rough clearing-of-throat noise that is rather like a laugh. She thinks: that we, ourselves, singular and individual are least equipped to tell our own stories and she thinks, on some level, that even the concept, the conceit of that is rooted in the strangest sort of human solipsism, which somehow combines self-obsession with the ineluctable need to be seen. And it's not like she doesn't share in that need to be seen, because fuck. Look at what she's wearing. And she doesn't say any of that because she doesn't really know the word solipsism and is instead mostly think-feeling all that shit.

Complicated, see?

"My folks had two places when I was born. This apartment on the Upper East Side that was mostly my dad's during the week, and a house in Bridgehampton, where the family stayed. He'd come home, sometimes. Weekends, I guess. Went to boarding school when I was seven or eight. Then it was summers and holidays, then like, that time kinda eroded, too. School was out in the middle of fucking nowhere in the west of Ireland. This big fucking neo-Gothic mansion called Kylemore. All girls, run by nuns. Hail Mary full of fucking Grace."

Elijah

"The only way that a place called Kylemore could even be remotely cool would be if the place had secret passageways and you girls had this whole Secret Garden style escape from oppressive nuns and the world blossomed into fucking technicolor as a respite for gray skies and rulers," he says, muses. builds it up because he has within him a desire to embellish things. To paint something drab a little more favorable color instead of seeing what he had been invited to see once before- something desolate. Something lonely.

It's complicated, see, when people can split time. When children are accessories or burdens.

"Nuns are fucking brutal."

Not joking. Completely serious. He's been on the wrong side of an angry nun a couple times. You don't grow up in Louisiana without brushing against Catholicism at the very least. He ruminates on this for a moment before firing back with.

"Best kiss? Or favorite?"

Serafíne

"How about first?"

She tosses back. As if this were an auction, or a treaty negotiation. Mouth curled, yeah.

Always.

Elijah

""First? Sold."

First?

He had tot hink about this one, could think about the first time he had sex easily enough, if only because he'd told someone, hunted through details, went back through a year book to see if he could find that girl's name out and still drew a blank.

"I was thirteen and her name was Megan. Megan was a freshman and people kinda thought she was going tyo get pregnant before she graduated and drop out or whatever, but we were in the same pottery class. Jenn didn't like her," Jenn still doesn't like her, "but I didn't think there was anythign wrong because she was cool, yeah? She went to parties with seniors and had her belly button pierced.

"Like, I knew girls were around? And I knew guys were around? The first person I wanted to kiss was James Evanson but I was pretty sure the dude who sat behind me in algebra would have kicked my ass if I kissed him so, like, second person was Jenn but I thought that's gonna be weird, you know her mom and her dad went to prison once and might actually kill you so no.

"So anyway, Megan was actually about number seven on the list of people I wanted to kiss when I was thirteen but that's totally not the point." He laughed, laughed because thirteen year old Elijah logic was, for lack of a better word, completely irrational. He shrugs, goes on through the story. Cavalier about the experience, "So Megan shows up and I'm elbow deep in clay and she tells me her parents aren't going to be home until late so I walk her home after school and she lives in the freaking swamps in this trailer park and nobody in their right mind wants to actually go there but she lives there so we're going, right?

"The house is a place straight out of the seventies, and she pops the liquor cabinet open and offers me a bottle of something that tastes like fucking rubbing alcohol. So we drink a little... or a lot... I don't know. I remember feeling really shitty, like, an hour in and she told me that this was completely normal and she ends up sitting on top of me on the couch and we kind of made out and I had no idea what I was doing but I ended up with my hand up her shirt and that was the first time that I had encountered real, non-imaginary boob so I thought I was doing pretty awesome.

"I walked home after that? It was kind of a standing arrangement after that? Tuesdays, I'd walk her home, she'd get me drunk and we'd make out on a shitty couch. Lasted about a month before she got a real boyfriend. She ended up being my dealer later."

Serafíne

"Katie O'Connor. In the Chapel, this night in October. You know how the light changes in fall, right? Just kind of starts gathering itself inwards, shrinking. It's not dark all the time yet and the sun is so fucking persistent but the bite in the air, come morning. The frost from your breath.

"Goosebumps prickling up your arms as you're stumbling out of the dorm for vespers and breakfast and that sense of night around you, even when it is just incipient, the world stitching itself up at the edges.

"I had cigarettes, sometimes. One of the gardeners would bring them to me, and somehow I lifted the sacristy key right off Father Flaherty, like three fucking times, is how little attention he paid. Finally managed to make a mold from it in this old bar of soap. Communion wine is shit, man. Usually, but sometimes he'd buy himself a nice bottle and to sip on a Friday then blend in the remainder of it to be blessed.

"Fuck it, anyway. We'd sneak off to the chapel to smoke cigarettes or maybe get high. It was away from the dorms, away from the great house, down this path in the woods and we'd sit behind the altar, watching the smoke rise and mingle with the moonlight. I think the first seventeen joints I smoked were tobacco and like dried banana peel but finally we go our hands on the real thing. It was so fucking blissful.

"She fell asleep with her head on the crook between my arm and shoulder. We woke up in the predawn, shivering, it was so cold. Our breath looked like smoke.

"I kissed her, then.

"After that, we'd go to the chapel to smoke and get high and make out and I kissed her a helluva lot more. 'Til we got caught.

"She got suspended I got expelled. Because I was quote unquote incorrigible.

"She had freckles like you wouldn't believe, Katie."

Elijah

He listens to the story. To the whole of it, the ins and the outs with Katie O'Connor and the moments of rebellion and the taste of another person. The feeling of something that felt, loud and clear like it mattered. Something that pinged on his senses like romance, actual romance.

She had freckles like you wouldn't believe, Katie.

"Personally, I think incorrigible is a fucking fantastic way to be. They're implying that it's a hopeless cause, but... y'know... it's incorrigible, not to be corrected, improved, or reformed because there isn't anything there that needs to be changed."

A beat, a thought, then?

"Do you ever wake up and think you know, I'm pretty fucking awesome?"

Serafíne

"I always wake up and think, you know, I'm pretty fucking awesome."

The wry curl of her mouth crawls wider. The convex surface of her dark lenses just hold his gaze, fixed and unyielding.

"Do you?"

A beat.

"Doesn't everyone?"

Elijah

"It's hit and miss," he doesn't look away. She doesn't look away, and he doesn't either. Isn't going to shy away since he'd been the one who had wanted to talk about things. He'd wanted to know, so he asked, "but generally the I'm pretty neat outweighs the I'm a royal shitbag most of the time. I'm cool with the awesome-to-not ratio."

The One Where Sera Rewinds Time

Grace

[Previous posts, for reference!]

Grace

It's been a shitty few days. But for someone else in the place, it's been a whole lot shittier.

Grace doesn't understand Quiet. She's never been through it, never seen anyone go through it. The closest she's come has been suffering from a Technocratic virus meant to torture its victims as much as possible through hallucinatory horror. So she has sympathy when Samir takes apart his bed or spends the day cleaning furiously. She's always there with food, cutting through his bullshit to make him eat. Thinks this might have been something the monster did to him.

She couldn't really leave the office the day before yesterday. He was more out of it than usual, and somebody had to make sure he wouldn't bolt out and start wandering the streets again, muttering about that woman who tried to put government mind-control agents in his food.

Not that he'd get too far, because Grace hasn't yet shut down her monitoring program.

Yesterday, though, he wouldn't eat. Wouldn't do anything. His little red dot on her map of Denver didn't move.

Today, the dot is on the move again. And Grace is on her phone in the kitchen, calling Sera. The only time he's been halfway coherent was after she helped him get there.

Sera, your phone is ringing.

Serafíne

The creature sounds - well - sleepy when she answers. Like she was drowsing on a blanket spread out beneath the late summer sun, or maybe - just maybe - rolling over amidst the rich tangle of her fluffy white duvet and crisp sheets. This lazy, back-of-her-throat sound as her mouth more-or-less finds the right spot on her iPhone for talking. That's all luck.

"Grace. 'Sup?

Grace

"Hey, Sera. It's about Samir -- I don't know if you know him? The guy from the... a few days ago? Things aren't really improving," she says, glancing at the plate she made up with all of Samir's favorites.

"He's not eating. Or drinking. I really don't want to take him to the hospital, but eventually, you know, people get dehydrated... I don't really know what to do."

She's avoiding saying all the reasons he's giving for not eating. And of course, she doesn't want to take him to the hospital for Reasons. That's not even close to an option.

"He seemed to do better with you."

Because, you know, you have that magic touch, there, Sera.

Serafíne

"Mmmph."

Something something in the background. Music. A window rattling open, perhaps, the assertion of exterior noise, the hum of some insistent insect. The world is so alive, and beneath it this susurrant huskhuskhusk. That's the comforter, trailing along the floor behind her. Unwinding.

"Where are you?" Then: "Where's that?"

And then:

"Okay. Be there soon."

--

A half-hour, maybe forty-five minutes later, a van pulls up to a certain address in another section of town. The passenger's door opens, and rather spare young woman in a short pink sundress covered in bumble bees. Thigh-high fishnets held up by visible garters encase her legs, right down to her well-worn black combat boots. Damp curls fragrant around her shoulders, a thermos full of whiskey-spiked Darjeeling in hand, she hangs out long enough for her companion - tall, blond, beared, lanky - to park and circle the van and come up alongside her.

Together, they head toward the closest door-like thing they see.

Grace

[Awareness! Can we sense the approach of a Sera?]

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

Grace

Grace lets Sera know the address -- a place West of Denver proper, on the outskirts of town.

The Warehouse sits beside the Office, a two-story building. Neither look like much from the outside, which is probably the point. A horribly faded image of a cow decorates the side of the Warehouse, which might lead one to believe that this place was attached to a dairy business at one point. It is not, anymore. For one thing, dairies don't generally have need for such thick doors, with what appear to be biometric locks.

Grace is expecting visitors, and she can feel the mesmerizing presence of Sera filtering in through all the other resonant signatures here. It doesn't take her long to appear at the door to the Office, opening it with a crunching noise.

"Hey, Sera. Dan," she says, keeps the door open for them -- but not too much. Persimmon, one of Kalen's Bengal cats is eyeing the door like it is a portal into a strange new world.

Serafíne

The door opens. There they are, the pair of them. Sera has her head tipped back - gleaming sunglasses obscure her eyes - but she is sort of looking over the frames at Dan, who has a tattooed hand on her shoulder and is laughing, or maybe smirking, just a bit at something Our Sera said.

He glances up, inhales as the door opens, and - nah. Doesn't say anything except, "Grace," which serves as a stand-in greeting for the two of them because Sera kinda waves her thermos of tea.

In through the door and they are both looking around because the place is so - well - unusual and the technological locks honestly kinda freak Sera out so good thing she doesn't really notice-notice them.

"Interesting place," Dan to Grace, as he steps in behind Sera. "Kinda feel like I'm entering the lair of a Bond villain. Or at least the movie-set of the lair of a Bond villain."

Sera, for her part, lofts one of her straight dark brows over the rim of her oversized glasses. Fixes them on Dan, briefly, then back at Grace. "Where is he?"

Samir, she means. Of course.

Samir

Yesterday the dot had no more energy than a slug. Even a slug is possessed of a sense of self-preservation. All living creatures have within them such a drive but Samir is trapped in a reality that doesn't match the reality his friends know. The other day Sam was able to claw his way back to some semblance of sanity. He isn't having wild visual hallucinations or hearing so much noise that he can't concentrate anymore but Sam doesn't know how long he's going to be like this. Quiet doesn't come with an instruction manual.

Today Sam is tired. Call it a bout of despair. His only options are to fight off the madness for a few hours and be incapable of doing so much as hauling himself out of bed for the rest of the next day or to lock himself in his room so Grace doesn't keep trying to get him to ingest whatever mind-control substance the government or the Technocracy maybe it's the Technocracy maybe it's some other entity he hasn't thought of yet but the voices are angry with him and if they can't get him to do what they want him to do one way they'll find another.

So he went with Option B.

The dot is upright and active. Thus far it hasn't moved from its place on Grace's map of Denver.

Grace

"The Bond villain's totally Kalen," Grace says, nods at him. Inside the place, it looks (and feels) more like a Hermetic's lair, with the resonance of Kalen and Elijah seeped into the pores of the wood. Kalen likes his interiors beautiful and decorated, with deep, jewel-tones on the walls, and paintings, maps, objects plenty. If Sera ever makes it to the library, she will find a rather large marble lion statue -- it is that kind of place.

"He has locked himself in his room. I'll show you," she says to Sera's question, and turns to go up the stairs.

Serafíne

So, jewel tones, paintings, rich warm woods, libraries with enormous marbles statues hidden away behind a concrete facade with a fading dancing cow, thick doors and biometric locks.

Definitely Bond villain. The vibe only deepens the further they get inside.

Dan gives Grace a quick little - something. Grin? Grimace? Something between? through the beard and falls into step behind Sera as they head up the stairs. She's being pretty quiet, keeps pace, doesn't take off the sunglasses, makes all the turns and follows all the paths.

Upstairs, the hallway: "You have a key right?" Sera, quiet. "Lock-picking's not exactly one of my skills."

Grace

Grace looks like she's just coming to think of the idea of a key. Of course, Sera needs to get in. Samir's locked the door. That all makes sense. Part of the reason why she gave Samir a room that locked in the first place was to give him a sense of security. That's going to get violated now, isn't it?

"Key. Right. I do, hold on..." she says, and darts down the hallway, slipping her finger on a fingerprint-reader, which opens the vault-like door to her own office. The Bond villain vibe does not decrease. At all.

Soon, though, she's returning with a keyring of note. There's keys to their servers, to the freeze-dried goods larder, to the gun range, to a few other offices -- and Samir's room. She holds out the right one to Sera.

"I don't think he'll want me to be the one opening that door. He's been... unhappy with me today I think."

Samir

Oh good. Voices out in the hallway. Just what a guy who's already having auditory hallucinations and delusions concerning the intentions of the person who's been providing him with shelter wants to hear in a moment like this.

The door is already locked. On their side the girls can hear a rustling and then a very near thumping. (The audience can see Sam flying up from where he'd been sitting on the floor and grabbing a computer chair and then wedging it underneath the doorknob.)
He's breathing fast. He's scared.

Grace wasn't taking I'm not hungry for an answer earlier. They must have gotten to her already. He doesn't know who's with her and he doesn't particularly want to find out either.

Serafíne

"It's really good of you to watch out for him, Grace," Dan tells her when she returns with the key, remarking on the fact that Samir might be - unhappy with her. One of his hands is on Sera's spare shoulder, beneath her damp curls. The other is on her opposite bicep. They're close.

Sera accepts the key from Grace's hand. Well, first trades-off the thermos full of whiskey-laden tea, then accepts the key. She takes this neat little breath, watching Grace or a beat, or two, or even three longer than is necessary, then exhales, long and quiet. Wry.

"Grace," she says, still-quiet, frowning a bit, thoughtful. Glances down at the keys as she turns them over in-hand, then back up. "You know that's not about you, right? Right now. Whatever he's feeling. He's unmoored right now, that's all. Don't take it to heart. I'm sure he'll thank you for everything, when he's better."

--

Doesn't say anything more, Sera. Turns over the keys.

Opens the door.

--

Tries to, anyway. It only goes so far. Gets stuck and Sera tries to push it harder and it is Dan who stops her pushing Pulls her back a bit, a gentle pressure on her spine. Bends over and kisses her on the crown of her head, murmurs something into her ear.

It's not like a closed door will keep her from doing magick. It makes it harder, though.

--

"Samir, it's Sera. I wanna help, but you need to let me in. It's harder from out here. Please open the door."

Grace

"Oh, I'm very aware that's all about his... you know," Grace says. "I think he's afraid of me is all."

She takes the thermos, steps back, gives Dan this look: a bit of exasperation, though not at anyone in particular. More, this situation. It's frustrating. The door sticks, and Grace doesn't speak anymore. She just looks up at the ceiling, like it might have some answers.

There is a thing that might have some answers, might it not? She fishes for her cell phone in her jeans pocket, pulls it out.

Samir

"Ah, fuck..."

The muffled exclamation sounds almost mournful. Like this is worse than he thought it was so much as he can claim to be thinking part of his problem is his brain is always on and it's always overthinking but if his brain were the thing misfiring right now it'd be an easy fix. It's not his brain. It's his Avatar or the cosmos or the code. Something.

A moment of silent contemplation. Shut the fuck up. Think. Where the hell am I. Are there more of them? Does it matter? It doesn't matter. How the fuck does this window--

Oh there it goes.

A latch pops.

Serafíne

Sera listens. Closes her eyes behind those glasses and breathes out something like a sigh.

"I don't think there's anything we can do, Grace. I'm sorry. I'm just gonna go."

Nudges Dan with her right shoulder and hands the keys back to Grace, then turns around and heads back down the stairs.

Grace

She looks up from her phone (still showing Samir inside his room) when Sera speaks, her eyebrows almost meeting in the middle of her forehead. "Okay. I'll keep an eye on him, I guess."

She breathes out a sigh, and looks around -- at the door, at Sera, at Dan. "Well, thanks for coming, anyway. Any time you want to come by and play laser tag, or... our library is open to anyone, so..."

But, hey, maybe now's not the time.

"Just, yeah. If anything changes, I'll let you know."

Samir

[i am so sorry grace. soak roll per rules on p. 439 in M20.]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Samir

There's no more noise from inside the room after that.

Grace's computer screen can tell her more than the closed door can. She's not looking at it now but when she does she'll see the dot is moving at a decent clip. That drop down to the ground didn't hurt him at all. Truly the universe looks out for the young and the crazy.

Serafíne

Time 3. Rewind. Difficulty: 8 -1 (focus) -1 (resonance: liminal)

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 7) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Serafíne

Ditto. +1 (extending) -1 (quint)

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Serafíne

(Again, Damnit.)

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 7) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Serafíne

Per + Empathy

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 7, 10) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]

Serafíne

Stop.

They're walking away and Grace is saying something about fucking laser tag, her brows drawn together over her eyes, and outside there's more than the latch opening there is the rattle of a window in its casement and maybe the sudden drop of a body -

- no -

nothing hits the ground. No one heads downstairs. The seconds are peeling themselves backwards and apart and there is something about this that is so inherently wrong it feels like unsplitting a broken-atom, like pushing ink back into the nib of a pen. Just a wrench and shaking her hands are shaking her hands are shaking as she reaches out to take the keys from Grace's hand and Grace is saying or maybe thinking that Sera should be the one to open the door because Samir is maybe a little bit afraid of her right now and Sera is looking at the keys in her hand and gives Grace a quirky little frown, pushes the keys back into her hand.

"On second thought, he locked the door. Let's not barge in. Let's go back downstairs?"

So: noise outside. Grace's voice, others. Keys yes, but none in the lock.

Footsteps shuffling in recessional.

Dan's giving Sera a suspicious look but that might be the suggestion of restraint over the keys or something.

Grace

Time unhooks itself, starts rolling back. A few seconds go by, the other direction. Surely the universe won't miss them. Right?

For all Grace is aware, the lingering presence of Sera goes and makes her feel as though between-worlds in a sudden burst of Working that lingers -- without a trace of what actually changed -- right as she hands the keys over, trying to explain why she shouldn't be the one to open the door.

Sera's pushing the keys back on to her. Yes, let's go back downstairs. Grace didn't really want to open that door in the first place.

"Sure. There's a room with some couches down there," she says, gives Sera's shaking hands a little look. Wonders what changed her mind.

But then, she turns and walks down the hall again. Samir's sanctum of solitude won't be breached just yet.

Samir

They both know him better than they might think they do. He hasn't changed. It's the reality surrounding him that's changed. Samir is locked inside his own thin cocoon of paradox more than he can say to be locked inside that room but he is still in there somewhere.

They both know even if he has never admitted to it that Samir suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder. On a bad day he doesn't like to touch things other people have touched and he doesn't want to touch other people and he'll hole up in his own apartment. They've lost track of him for weeks already because he won't reach out when he's having a bad time and it's so easy to forget about him anyway. Even on good days he seems distracted by his own thoughts.

This is a bad day. With mood swings and voices whispering in his ear.

He is sitting on the floor in the corner of the room. The window is closed. The door is locked but not barred. There are two voices out in the corridor. He breathes slow and waits until he hears footsteps retreat down the corridor. Then he crawls underneath the reassembled bed and wraps his arms around his ribs and closes his eyes.

Serafíne

Downstairs, they find the couches Grace mentioned. Sera can feel the faint jangle of broken reality behind her eyes, at the back of her skull, held off, waiting. So she closes her eyes and doesn't really think about it.

She's good that that, Sera. Not thinking about the Thing Behind Her when she wants to avoid instead of simply deny reality.

Dan sits in the corner of the couch. Sera sits beside him, sort of curls up against him. Rests her sharp little chin on his chest. Grace might offer them something to eat - that happens here sometimes, or so we hear, but if so Sera waves it off. Unscrews the lid on her thermos and takes a sip of her whiskey-laced tea.

Then gulps it down like a shot.

Does another like that.

"Tell me what that room looks like, Grace. While I Work. It'll help me imagine it."

Correspondence 2: to establish the link through which she can cast. Is this vulgar too? -1 (focus) -1 (time)

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

Serafíne

(Extending:

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace

They do pass a kitchen on their way downstairs. There is a cake on the table inside, and some cookies. They are vegan carob cookies, because Samir used "I'm a vegetarian" as an excuse not to eat once. Now, the taste of those atrocious cookies might be what's caused him to believe them to be full of mind-control goo. Carob kind of has that lingering aftertaste.

But they pass it, and Grace offers a cookie (because she wants to find somebody else who likes them other than Elijah) and gets told no. And they continue.

"Well, depending on whether he's disassembled his bed again, there *is* a bed in there. Or at least parts of one. It's a rectangular room. Like, about four hundred square feet? And the walls are green. Tile floors, with some of Kalen's Persian rugs on them, because it's all tile and he might want to go barefoot. Um... there's a window? It faces West."

There's other things too. A painting on the wall that Grace only barely recalls, and a couch (because this place sprawls with couches). There's a dresser too. But she doesn't mention those.

Instead, she goes to one of the puffed-up overstuffed chairs in the little sitting room and plops herself into it.

Samir

There was a painting on the wall. Now it's been taken down and propped canvas-side towards the wall. No damage done to it but Sam didn't want the damned thing watching him and he had to scrub the walls down anyway. That room smells much more strongly of antiseptic than it ever did before he started staying with them and that window may have been open while he was on his cleaning binge Monday but it's just as likely he did not open it.

Irrelevant. Sera can't see what Sam is doing upstairs. She can feel the low hum of his resonance for the persistence of his Quiet. Like threading a needle. He's oblivious. If he were in his right mind he would have snipped the thread so soon as he was aware of it but he is not aware of it. He's underneath the bed trying to sleep.

It's difficult. Sometimes he hears the echoes of a monstrous woman's shriek. He smells rotting meat.

He does nothing to resist Sera.

Serafíne

Dan tightens his arms around Sera's spare shoulders. Even he can feel the hum of her resonance, the en-victualled, enthralling thrill of it. A few of the hairs on his forearm stand on end. She is both here and / there because there is no here or / there there is only is. Can't see it but behind the glasses her eyes are closed. Her throat works neatly to swallow another mouthful of tea that Dan kindly helps her steer toward her lips. Not that she's drunk this quickly, no, but she started earlier and she is allowing herself to become loosed, unmoored, unmade, undone. Something very un-everything about her magick. The way she lets go of her/self the way she has neither her nor self, the way she becomes everything and nothing.

just, you know, all.

Starts humming somewhere in all this, nothing more than a hum, faint enough that it sounds meditative.

First: calm mind. Dif: 7 -1 (focus) -1 (time)

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (4, 5, 5) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

Extending: +1

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

Serafíne

Extending again!

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

Grace

Grace has never really understood how this works. How Sera can just drink a thing or smoke a thing and the universe changes for her. I mean, if that were a thing that worked, every college student who ever filled a stairwell with the aroma of pot would be turning back the pages of Time as they did so.

But, however it works, it does. That's all Grace really needs to know.

She stays quiet as Sera does her thing. Personally, she always likes a bit of focus when she's untangling the Tapestry's strings, making them dance to her direction. She does, however, pull a leg up into the chair, her foot resting in her lap. It's comfortable, for a certain type of person...

Samir

To compare it to the sudden yearned-for cessation of a headache isn't accurate. It's close. He may very well never talk to either of the women downstairs about what it's like to live with his illness. Ignore the fact that they're the closest thing to friends he has in this city.

Well. One of them is. One of them was or could have been or almost was. Plenty of reasons for her not to be here and she is anyway. Neither of them can reach in and pluck the paradox from the room cast it outside blot it out with her own energy but getting him to sleep so he can fight this off himself is a greater help than Sam can even see right now.

He isn't blind to the world around him. When Grace found him he was. He was getting better and he's blind to the fact that he was getting better.

That itch to check everything in the room is gone. He's too tired to stay busy enough to keep himself distracted from the thoughts that let themselves in unannounced. Those stop too.

Sam exhales as if he'd been holding his breath this entire time. No one is there to see it. He's alone with his madness but it's a madness reduced to one front now. May take him a few days to come out of it enough to recognize that he wasn't actually alone. Right now he's tired and no one is trying to open the door.

He lies still a moment and when he's assured of the fact that he can move Sam rolls onto his back and climbs out from under the bed.

Serafíne

4 Grace does not understand how Sera can do what she does, and the truth is that that equation works the other way, too. Sera does not understand how magick can function within the confines of all these devices, programs, data.

But she's not thinking about any of that right now. She is / everywhere. A moment where her mouth is seamed and her eyes are closed and the humming stops.

Then something else. Sharper, more gut-wrenching than the work she has done until now. You can do this/You can make it through.

(mind 2/prime 2 - modified cult-y hope's birth, which can give 1 temp willpower. this is more like a gut-twisting affirmation of strength/life than hope, specifically. Would be more poetic but it is late and I am tired).

Dif: 6 -1 (resonance) -1 (focus)

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (4, 5, 6) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Serafíne

Extending.

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 8) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Serafíne

"I think that's all I can do." Sera murmurs when she comes to / from wherever she's been, Half-sitting up, dress rucked up, hair mostly dry by now, at least on the surface. Dan helps her off him and then stands up and reaches down a hand for her and she rises, too. Gives Grace a distracted little smile and heads out with Dan. He opens the van door for her, reading a certain tension in her brow and in her body that has him paying attention to her as he circles the van, opens the driver door, climbs inside.

Waits.

Serafíne

Paradox.

Dice: 14 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 9 )

Serafíne

Soak

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )

Leah

Serafíne

Awareness / Perception

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 6 ) [Doubling Tens]

Emily

There's a concert in the park tonight. One last summer event before the city settles in for autumn. Nothing big, but a temporary stage has been set up in the grass and a couple of local bands are set to play. Across the park, the sound of folksy art-rock rolls over the green hills. They can hear a dim echo of it in the zoo, and some of the animals decide to join in by uttering an occasional answering call into the air.

It's a relaxed affair, as concerts go. The mood is pleasant and friendly among the crowd, with a number of people passing around joints to share. Some of them lay sprawled out together on blankets, while others stand in groups, swaying and dancing in time to the music. Towards the back, a few people have broken out snacks and bottles of wine.

Some of the people come and go, as visitors wander through the park and stop to listen before continuing on their way. One such person happens to be a girl of about nineteen who's standing beneath the overhanging shade of a tree near the back of the audience. She's tall, this girl. Maybe 5'10-5'11. With wavy dirty-blond hair and a rounded face. Her eyes are shut as she listens to the music, and for a moment she puts her arms up against the tree and sways back and forth - letting herself become absorbed in the song. It's a pretty composition. A little sad and a little eerie (a woman haunted by the ghosts of her past.) The lead vocalist has a deep, rich voice with a powerful range, but here she uses it in an understated way.

This girl. The one under the tree. She isn't a face that Sera would recognize, but she feels so very familiar. Her resonance is fiery and powerful, cycling and regenerating. Like a phoenix. (Like Leah.) Here though, the sensation is stronger. And instead of the volatile blister of scorching heat there is instead a deep, lambent flame - burning like a bonfire.

Perhaps the similarity is an odd coincidence. Perhaps not.

Serafíne

Dusk still lingering against the edges of the sky and strangers sprawled all around the lawn. Someone dancing in gyrating circles down near the stage, more than one someone. Lazy circles to match both the music and the mood, like dervishes slowed to half or maybe even quarter-time, girls in long skirts with bare feet and hemp anklets strung with little bells, this guy with who bops up and down like a goat on acid, but only sometimes, you know. Dances like that no matter who's playing: it's more about the motion than the music.

--

"Hey." Not really interrupting, Sera kinda waits for the song in which the strange (?) is absorbed to work itself through, and end. Everything ends, right? Even music you can get lost in live in a park on a lazy summer night when the sky has gone half-golden with the banked and fading glow of a falling sun. The hey comes from a chick in a see-through white lace sundress layered over black lingerie. Yes, see: you are supposed to look at the way the attire frames, reveals, and conceals her body. Blond hair pulled back from sharp, striking features in a messy and haphazard twist.

Dark blue eyes reflecting the last shreds of the sun skim the stranger's profile. This little knot of consideration between her brows, neat and thoughtful and defined.

"Leah?"

Trusts her feelings more than her eyes or almost anything else, Sera.

How many fucking times has that gotten her into trouble.

Emily

If it'd been anyone but Sera, maybe the girl wouldn't have turned. But it was Sera, and she did. There's an awareness to it. The way the girl's eyes settle on Sera's face and know her. She doesn't seem surprised. Maybe she felt Sera coming.

Up close, Sera can sense the working of the girl's Will. The finely crafted effort that went into reshaping her face and her hair. It's subtle - the hints of alteration. Nothing visible to the naked eye. Even to Sera's acute senses, it isn't easy to detect. Another mage probably would have missed it.

But Sera trusts her feelings more than her eyes. And in this case, those feelings turn out to be correct. The girl smiles. She doesn't seem high, but there is definitely something different about her (something besides her face and the burning strength of her resonance.) She looks... at home in her skin. There's a renewed sense of purpose and strength that tends to come after a successful Seeking.

She puts her finger to her lips. "It's Emily, here." She pauses, glances back at the stage. At the people gathered across the lawn. Suddenly, she smiles, reaching out to clasp Sera's hand - should she allow it. "Let's take a walk."

Emily

[Edit: remove that first "The girl smiles." I meant to erase that.]

Serafíne

Strange to clasp hands with someone mid-spell. This momentary dissonance that feels like being so fucking high the world around you has become entirely unmoored enough that you can be both chilling on a couch in a gross little bedsit in the west end and also soaring past the rings of Saturn or maybe some other fucking monstrous planet, who turns around and blows you a kiss. Why not?

Just this shard of it, but: of course she takes Leah/Emily's hand, watches her own fingers settle neatly between the other young woman's, and there is a dull flash of ache as she remembers: someone else whose hand she always holds. And then: another someone before him.

So: holding hands, music soaring behind them as they pick their way through picnickers with drowsing infants and kids to wrangle and other folks: getting high, getting to know each other, not giving a fuck about knowing each other but making out anyway, or maybe just watching the sky and waiting for the first stars to emerge.

Sera does not say much or really even anything until the outer perimeter of the audience is still visible sure but beyond earshot and the music has become background instead of foreground.

"You feel renewed, yeah? Settled into your skin," which is a weird thing to say when she isn't even wearing her own skin, not precisely, but, " - what's all this for, though. Practice - or," complex shadows cut right across her features. " - something else?"

Emily

Leah (Emily) glances back at the crowd, and for a moment there's something slightly wistful in her eyes. Fondness and nostalgia mixed with yearning. Like she knows that she will always be at least a little bit apart from them. But on evenings like these, it's easy to pretend that things are different. That all of them - Awakened, Asleep - still share the fundamental belonging of being human.

Sera wants to know why she changed her face. Why she calls herself Emily here.

"Annie thinks the Union is still looking for me. She doesn't like me going into the city, so I made Emily. It's easier, too. If I... run into anyone I used to know." She releases Sera's hand slowly, turning away from the crowd to look across the park as they walk. "We didn't plan to come back. Did she tell you that? Probably not. Our coven... they didn't give us a choice. Too dangerous, right? Keeping a potential Fallen in their midst."

Her voice cuts a little sharp and angry on that last line, and for a moment it looks as though a fire is being reflected in her eyes. Perhaps it's just a trick of the sunset.

"I guess I shouldn't blame them. Knowing who I used to be." She cants her eyes toward Sera with a searching gaze. "Do you ever regret helping me?"

Serafíne

"Look at you."

This moment where her whole-heart is seized and wrenched and not-precisely-shattered but, oh, Sera knows plenty about how to destroy a muscle like that. How to stitch every whole closed, too: again and again and again. Her breath catches in her throat, and she squeezes Leah's hand so tight the girl might be forgiven for wondering whether she can bear the grip.

"How the fuck could I ever regret you? Get that idea out of your head. It doesn't belong there. Seriously, look at you."

Emily

Sera grabs Leah's hand again, and the force of her grip is powerful enough to leave a bruise, but Leah doesn't cringe - doesn't shake her off (and later there won't be a bruise, because she is stronger than she looks.) Instead she looks at Sera and inhales sharply. It could be sound of pain, but it isn't. It's gratitude, maybe. For seeing her. For having always seen her.

The truth is, it could have been a trick. One day Leah might become the thing that John Brogan wanted her to be. Perhaps she already was. If so, she could do a lot of damage. (If this is how powerful she is at almost-nineteen, how much stronger is she going to be at twenty five? Thirty?)

But Sera is powerful too. What kind of damage is she capable of? What are any of them capable of?

When Sera looks at Leah, she doesn't see the angel of death. She sees something beautiful. (Because she is. They both are.) The thought of it brings a bright glisten of tears to Leah's eyes. They don't quite manage to spill over, but the wetness is visible.

"Thank you," she whispers.

It's a long moment before to speaks again.

"I remember more, each time. About who I've been. All of these other lives. Some of them... I wish I didn't remember. This time I remembered how I Fell. I don't want to remember that, but I have to. I think it's important. I made a choice to become that. The Order of Reason took everything from me and I was so... angry. I still am. I mean, look at this place. They stole the whole world from us."

Now the tears do fall, as Leah stops still and looks out onto the city. Her voice drops when she says, "I'm so tired of hiding. But I can't be that person again. I won't."

Emily

Emily

Sera grabs Leah's hand again, and the force of her grip is powerful enough to leave a bruise, but Leah doesn't cringe - doesn't shake her off (and later there won't be a bruise, because she is stronger than she looks.) Instead she looks at Sera and inhales sharply. It could be sound of pain, but it isn't. It's gratitude, maybe. For seeing her. For having always seen her.

The truth is, it could have been a trick. One day Leah might become the thing that John Brogan wanted her to be. Perhaps she already was. If so, she could do a lot of damage. (If this is how powerful she is at almost-nineteen, how much stronger is she going to be at twenty five? Thirty?)

But Sera is powerful too. What kind of damage is she capable of? What are any of them capable of?

When Sera looks at Leah, she doesn't see the angel of death. She sees something beautiful. (Because she is. They both are.) The thought of it brings a bright glisten of tears to Leah's eyes. They don't quite manage to spill over, but the wetness is visible.

"Thank you," she whispers.

It's a long moment before to speaks again.

"I remember more, each time. About who I've been. All of these other lives. Some of them... I wish I didn't remember. This time I remembered how I Fell. I don't want to remember that, but I have to. I think it's important. I made a choice to become that. The Order of Reason took everything from me and I was so... angry. I still am. I mean, look at this place. They stole the whole world from us."

Now the tears do fall, as Leah stops still and looks out onto the city. Her voice drops when she says, "I'm so tired of hiding. But I can't be that person again. I won't."

[repost!]

Serafíne

Somewhere down a path, in the gloaming. They say that Europeans did not know what to do with the hum of insects in the North American summer when they first arrived on the continent. The constant drone of love-mad grasshoppers, cicadas, crickets, katydids flush through the wide lawn, the close-tended trees. Strangers in the distance add a low note in the distance, no more than a quiet drone. The view of the city laid out before then, distance enough that it assumes a sort of surreal frame, as if it had been painted onto a backdrop and infused with light. How close you can be, and how infinitely far, from something right in front of you.

--

Quiet, right. Sera can do quiet. If Leah wants to walk that's what they do, but they stop again, the view of the city and tears in Leah's eyes and - oh, fuck.

Sera wraps the crying girl up in her arms. Doesn't tell her to stop crying or that it'll all be okay or any of the usual stuff that we are programmed to mutter to avoid the embarassment and vulnerability inherent in tears: especially, in another's tears. Just wraps her up and maybe makes some comforting noises, because somehow those noises seem to naturally occur in the human body. Leah - at the least, this version of Leah - has a good six inches of height on Sera. They fit together just fine, though.

At least, if Leah allows the contact.

--

They peel apart, maybe early, maybe eventually.

"They didn't steal the world from us." This Sera says, with quiet certainty bordering on conviction. "We're still here, you and me. Aren't we? And sure I get beaten half to death when I try to save the life of a dying friend, but I'm still here.

"And fuck. The world's bigger than them-and-us, you know? It's enormous, effortless, eternal, infinite. It's so easy to get lost in the idea that because we have a beginning and an ending - birth and death - that everything else does, too.

"That's not meant to be comforting, by the way. I don't think it is comforting. But their victories are meaningless if you stand back and look at them from the distance of the stars, you know? It's like the length of a heartbeat, or less, measured against the span of a human life.

"I'm sorry you have to hide, from them or anyone. But you have chances now, and choices, that most people don't get - the first time around, you know? Let alone: the second or the third."

Emily

She doesn't make much noise when she cries. But for all that her face might be artificially crafted, the emotion displayed there is real. The impression - the way her brows tense and the way her chin shakes just slightly - is one of righteous anger as much as grief. She holds onto Sera with a tight grasp. It's the first time in a long time that she's held onto anyone with that kind of confidence, even with the way she has to bend into it to meet Sera's height.

Finally they break apart, and Leah wipes the wetness away from her cheeks with the back of a hand. "There's a part of us that's infinite too. But it doesn't make the things we do in this life less meaningful." It isn't said as a refute, really, so much as an observation (all things big and small.)

Still, she takes a breath, and it seems to calm her.

"It's what power does, I think. I used to watch the Order of Hermes and the Celestial Chorus wage wars in the name of their Reality. I wonder how different we'd be, if the Traditions had won instead of the Union. Would it be safe for ordinary people to gather like this in the park? Would they have that kind of freedom?" A beat and she looks at Sera. Smiles a little to show she's still present. "Don't worry, I'm not going to do anything stupid." She starts walking again, looking out over the horizon to watch the burnished sun paint patterns through the trees.

"There's a couple of Hermetics in town. Richard and Orrin. Have you met them?"

Serafíne

"Mine wasn't really an argument for nihilism, you know? So much as it was, fundamentally, against the idea that war is a thing you can win. I mean, for territory, sure. To stop genocide, all goddamned day. To tell people how the world should be, that shit fails."

This quick, rather grim, strangely winsome little smile that crests the curve of her mouth, then dissipates as easily and quickly. "I'm all about the here and now.

"It's not just power, either. It's how willing you are to privilege your beliefs, your wants, your desires, your need for vengeance, or honor, or certitude, or glory, over those of the chick standing next to you, and the guy next to her, and so on and so on.

"Not really meaningful when someone is hunting you down because she wants to imprison you for who you are, how you were born into this stupid fucking world. A little more meaningful when you're standing in front of a caul, and walking - away, instead of - into.

"I know you won't do anything stupid." Another neat, rather quiet twist of her mouth. "I believe in you."

--

"And naw. I haven't met the Hermetics. They don't usually fraternize with my sort, you know?"

Emily

"That's because they're assholes." It's a flippant comment, and for a moment it makes Leah seem more her age. More like the girl she probably would have been if she didn't have the weight of who-knows-how-much history woven into her soul. "Except for Henry. He gets a pass. And Elijah too, I guess."

But she'd mentioned Richard and Orrin for a reason.

"Richard's a Quaesitor. He's actually Henry's son, which... I still have a hard time believing. Orrin's a Flambeau. They're supposedly in Denver to investigate the deaths of some other Hermetics, but I think there's more going on than that. Annie isn't happy about them being here. Richard at least makes sense, but Orrin is a military commander. You don't send someone like that to investigate. You send them because you're expecting a fight. Or maybe you want to start one."

She glances at Sera, and for a moment she looks... worried. "You're right about war. No one ever wins. If you ever do see them, be careful. I don't think we should trust them."

Serafíne

"I'm not particularly good at being careful, either."

This tone of wry-truth, a certain curl of her sharp little mouth. The first time in a long time during this conversation that she allows her dark gaze to cut away from the younger woman, track out to the city spread over the high plains.

"If they're really investigating those deaths, you'd think they'd wanna talk to me." The curl of her mouth - crisps, like a sheet of vellum caught-to-flame. A certain brittleness there, a certain crackle. "I helped destroy the woman who killed them. If they'd bothered to work with us, they might still be alive.

"Tell Annie I'll keep - her concerns in mind. Okay?"

Emily

[Forces 2, coincidental, diff 5 -1 (practiced)]

Dice: 4 d10 TN4 (5, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Emily

There's a wry little smirk from Leah when Sera mentions that she's not good at being careful, but it fades at the mention of Sera's involvement in Victoria's death.

"Yeah. I don't know. I'll be glad when they leave."

She stops a moment, thoughtful, then shoots Sera a flashing look, her eyes glimmering with this slow-burning challenge. "Think you can beat me to that tree?" She cants her head toward a tall oak about 100 feet away. Before Sera can answer, Leah takes off running, her hair billowing behind her like golden flames. She isn't an athlete, but it doesn't really matter. She just wants to run. To feel the wind on her skin. So she does. And even though she has to be careful, she allows herself this small moment of freedom: kicking up the wind around her in a passionate swirl that grows stronger and stronger as she nears her destination. It whips over the grass in a spinning vortex, leaving behind a series of windswept spirals.

Maybe she gets there first, or maybe Sera does. Maybe Sera just laughs and lets her run. Either way, Leah spins around and falls back into the grass, laughing. In that moment, she is both childlike and ageless.

Probably, they go back to the concert after that. And there isn't any more mention of war or the Technocracy. Because there's music and pot and wine and people and there's only so much room in life for worrying about the unknown.