Do-Nots

Serafíne

Thursday late night: a few galleries still open, sure. This opening or that charity function, the warmth of the sunlit day fast fled but anyplace with a patio has gas-flame heaters going to extend the useful life of their outdoor spaces well beyond summer. Pedestrians aplenty though at this hour most of the people slipping out of the odd gallery or restaurant still open are not heading out to bar-hop, but are heading home. Taxis hum on the corners and the bars are still - not crowded, precisely, but pleasantly full and life pulses up and down the street.

The Stone Pony had one of its signature Low-Dough Local Shows tonight and is more crowded than most. There's even a fresh-donut food-truck (WARD'S DO-NUTS) parked in the empty lot across the street, which is hard to resist after a night full of drinking.

Out on the sidewalk in front of the bar, a certain creature sits. Legs drawn-up to her torso, one arm loose around them. Cheek resting against the apex of her knee, eyes kinda-mostly closed, she has had enough to drink and/or smoke that she is in that drifting phase, but periodically brings a spiced cigarette up to her mouth (sideways, pointing on an upslant, away from her golden curls) and takes a drag. There's a dog curled up on the sidewalk at her side.

Folks leaving the bar to head across to WARD'S DO-NUTS walk around her without really looking at her or acknowledging her, but folks do that all the time with strangers sitting on the street. Avoid eye contact, refuse acknowledgment, ignore, ignore, ignore.

Elijah

It had been a running of the gauntlet, really. He had intended on talking to Yvette today but found that she was conspicuously not at work and doing whatever it was Yvette did when she had a day off work. Nobody at the gallery knew whens he was coming back,; Elijah presumed she got fed up and quit. Shrugged it off, lacking some vital information to follow up on. It was the first few moments that he hadn't spent glued to Jenn today.

She was scared; he couldn't stop apologizing. We digress.

So, he was walking, walking because he needed the air and he's tracing back his thoughts and the words he's said. Should probably feel guilty about not offering to help but, frankly, Elijah wanted to be involved with this whole human chimera business about as much as he wanted to remove his kidney with a butter knife- which is to say, not at all. He inhaled slow and deep and tried to remember where it was that he had parked in the first place.

The walking always takes you somewhere, though, and soon enough the walking took him to a bar that he had considered going into but decided against because, well, he was working right now. It might not have looked like it, but the young man in his vest and button down shirt had actually been doing things that he had deigned to be important.

He doesn't pass by Serafine, though. Stops and sits down beside her, on the opposite side of the dog.

"You have a new friend," he said,indicating over to the dog.

Serafíne

Something so liquid about being this drunk, makes her feel like every joint in her body is made of warm, kinda melty butter, and that same looseness is evident when the creature opens her eyes and lifts her chin up-up-up just high enough to perch her chin-not-cheek on her bent right knee. Up close she smells like burnt sugar, cloves, whiskey, sweat. Has on this long-sleeved, high-necked dark sweater with little thumb loops at the end of the oversized sleeves, which may be the most modest thing he has ever seen her wear other than men's pajamas,

but no. When he sits down or maybe when she moves he can see that it is cropped so high it does not cover the lower curve of her breasts, and is oh-so-slowly raveling.

"Hey." Drunken ghost of a smile across her mouth, though its context is hard to read. Maybe she's curled up here because she can't quite walk. Maybe she's at the maudlin stage of way-too-much. "Long-time no-see. How're you?"

Then, a sort of orienting side-glance. Oh, the dog. Could be some random dog, right. "That's Sid."

Serafíne

How are you Elijah? Per + Empathy because.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]

Elijah

He's stressed, that much is clear. He's stressed but he's trying to play on being normal, because he can fake some normalcy from time to time- he's done it for years. Faked being fine long enough to get out of state care. Long enough that people think he's clean when he's not. He's stressed, but he wears it well when he's being honest about it.

Up close she smells like s'mores to him. The only time he's ever really had s'mores was when people were drunk and he associates the whiskey smell with camp fires for reasons he doesn't entirely understand. Or bonfires, more accurately. He associates campfires with tea and being cold enough that his bones ached and the air in his lungs was freezing and he had loved every blessed second of it because it meant he was alive and pushing past whatever limits he'd thought he had. Work until whatever the discomfort is becomes normal. Then, redefine.

He's stressed, but he's happy to see her. The kind of happy that comes when you've missed someone and he has, indeed, missed her. Missed the smell, missed the context. Missed the textures ebcause she had a number of textures. He didn't have enough details to render her into spoken word, but some part of him now has a strange taste in his mouth when he thinks of people as art because the concept could be taken too far and-

Well, now. That evokes a completely different scent on his senses.

"Hi, Sid," said in the voice that is reserved for puppies, a little like he's talking to a baby that might bite his arm off. Then, back to normalcy, "I'm tired, but I'll be okay."

A beat.

"Taking tonight to be alone?"

Serafíne

Sid cocks an ear and lifts her muzzle from her paws and looks up and across Sera's when Elijah speaks to her in that puppy-baby voice. It's a look, you know: strange little doggie eyebrows moving, something on her new spiked-leather-collar clinking with the motion. Then she drops her head back to her paws. Thumps her tail once or twice in acknowledgment of the greeting but it is late and she is tired and it is sleep-time even if her human pack doesn't seem to understand that that's what darkness is for.

Sera, though. Sera looks at him longer than the dog does. Pivots her chin on her knee as if it were a fulcrum, and reaches out to offer him her cigarette. Awkward little movement, that - hand half-buried in her too-long sleeve, thumb and index finger pinched around the filter of the cigarette like she was holding a joint.

And if he takes the cigarette, then her hand is free and she reaches out to give his hair an affectionate and maybe comforting ruffle. Brushes her thumb over his temple.

And he asks if she's taking tonight to be alone and well, she gives him a neat little shrug and a banked, drunken blink. "Yeah." Could just have slid out of the bar for a smoke, though on an ordinary night she might've done that alone or might've done that with a stranger she wanted to make out with. "Not sure if I can get up right now. Ever have one of those nights where you're all fuck. What the fuck are these things at the end of my things and how the fuck do they work?"

Elijah

She offers the cigarette and he does take it, takes a drag and tastes what's there. Has a moment and he's absorbing tastes and sensations and the way it feels when smoke tries to encroach into your lungs and your brain is insisting that this is bad for it but your body is telling your brain to fuck off. He doesn't actually smoke that often, all things told. More for ritual purposes or, in these instances, when someone else is smoking. He smokes a whole lot less once he started taking studying a little more seriously.

He closes his eyes when he feels her hand in his hair. Grins just a little at the edges and exhales away from Serafine and her new canid companion.

"I'd offer to take you home, but I'm afraid you might fall off the back of the motorcycle," he tells Sera, "and Sid wouldn't fit."

It takes him a little while, though, to piece through what she just said and it makes him laugh, "I haven't had one of those in awhile, I'm kinda jealous not gonna lie."

Serafíne

Truth is, she wouldn't mind if he exhaled in her direction. She'd breathe that in, the way she does everything else.

"I have - " there's hang-time in her sentences, space-between and he can here that now, maybe see it. She gestures with her free hand (the worn not sliding through his block locks) like the word she wants is floating in the air in front of her if only if only she could pull them out of the ether. Oh, there. " perfect balance. I wouldn't fall off. Sid's a fucking racehorse. "

He hasn't had one of those in a while; one of those nights, when she strings them together, one after another, like gleaming little gems on a hand-knotted necklace. "S'cause all'a that fucking book-shit. If you'd been my apprentice - "

Inhales again, all-at-once, and kinda refocuses, reaches for the cigarette because here's the deal, she wanted it back, yo. "That why you're all stressed out? Or is it something else?"

About ten feet down, the door to the bar opens. Music spills onto the street, some electric blues with a deep bass line and a girl's lilting soprano floating above it as people come out into the bright, crisp night.

Elijah

"Well, if you want to go home, let me know because I can take you. And I'll go slow enough that, y'know, Sid can follow. It'll be like having a one person parade or some shit," he replies.

Forgets he has the cigarette, though, and then she's talking about how he could have totally had more blazing drunk nights and epiphanies set in motion by pushing and transcending basic human consciousness into something sublime. She's plucking it out of his fingertips and once he realizes she wants it he makes a little sound of recognition, gives it up with little fanfare.

Was he stressed out about the Order, though? Or was it something else?
"The book shit's pretty relaxing, not gonna lie. I like it a lot better than I thought I would," he starts, "but mostly it's-"

a second, he hears the floating soprano songstress in the background, enough to catch the pitch but not enough to pick out whether or not he knows the singer. "You remember that thing that tried to eat Sam and me in the park back in August?"

Serafíne

He asks her if she remembers that thing that tried to eat Sam and Elijah in the park back in August and Sera makes a strange little face; straight flat brows drawn together and a note of something like she's trying to put together a dimensional puzzle on a remarkably flat surface, or is maybe simply drunk, or maybe both and she doesn't really understand which is which. But:

"Mmph." That noise means, no. She does not? Remember that thing. Remembers Samir being in quiet, though. Remembers - oh so distinctly - a particular branching of time that no one else remembers quite simply because she reversed and reworked it and got knocked the hell out by reality for her troubles. So: maybe one thing (hungry-monster) explains the other (Samir-in-quiet) and that Mmph could mean as much yes as no, or maybe even go on.

Someone's holding the door open for other someones and this little knot is breaking away to head across the street to WARD'S DO-NUTS, why not. The soprano voice lilts beautifully in the bright cold air.

Elijah

[can I place that voice? Do I know it? Looking! per+alert]

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

Elijah

"Well," he continues, because there's a whole story here, he continues, "once Sam was a functional person again, we went to go check some things out. Looked back at the past, blahblahblah got a lead-"

it dawns on him that talking about this out in the middle of the open air when some incredibly polite Euthanatos is looking for a person who could literally be anyone probably wasn't the best idea. Drops his voice because (given the fact that he just saw a very familiar arm attached to a bearded person he totally recognizes) and-

"Long story short, Jenn did a painting that turned out to be a Nephandus and now Henry's calling in favors and I'm trying to sell Jenn on the idea of chilling with a bunch of reality breakers out in Morrison on an extended witness protection-style vacation."

Kiara

[Can we sense a Sera and an Elijah?]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 8) ( success x 1 )

Serafíne

She's really fucking drunk. Takes her a minute to let the loops and whorls of the story, the declensions and the allusions and all the strange little bits of code our Elijah (conscious of the public street, the story, the potentiality of intrusion) wraps this in but she's really strangely still while she follows the looping path and finally (does she know who Henry is? WE ARE NOT SURE AND NEITHER IS SERA but this happens pretty regularly to her so it's really no big deal and also No Big Deal.
"Have you warded her?" A sloe-drunk blink. A beat. "Has anyone?"

Has a few places where Jenn could stay if Morrison's objectionable. Or if the folks out there object to having a potentially-hunted human so close to the Node, but doesn't say anything about that. Not yet.

Meanwhile the last of the group has spilled out of the door and yeah, Elijah, you recognized that arm and the owner of that arm is starting to cross the street when he does a bit of a double-take and waves off Dee and a few friends and redirects, heads straight for the young Hermetic.

"Hey man." Dan greets Elijah when he's close. "What are you doing out here by yourself?"

Kiara

"I don't get half of what we just spent two hours lookin' at, but damn if I didn't enjoy the free food."

The voice that curls along the street is masculine; low and steady. There's a consideration to the subtle edge of twang to it. Texan, perhaps, long ago. Now it's melted and softened into something else, something that doesn't stand out so entirely against the backdrop of Denver, but still -

"Well you've been collecting dust out there in Morrison long enough, I figured - "

"Funny. You remember where Deb said she was gonna swing by?"

There's the scuffle of footsteps and a couple appear, meandering down the street. They're dressed a little fancier than some; suit and tie for the man, a dark burgundy dress for the female that slinked around her ankles in a swish of silk. There's a slash of red painted across the female's mouth, it might have been enough to sight Kiara Woolfe but then -

There's that little give to the atmosphere. That pulse; that tickle of rejuvenating energy. Sid may well be the first to feel it. There's that supple tremor to the universe the Verbena brings with her with all her dark hair and quicksilver smiles; a vibration against the strings.

-

Half way down the street and they're passing a bar and Kiara makes this soft, subvocal noise and unlinks her arm; turns her face into the distance for a beat. Neal's pocket vibrates.

"Deb. She's about a block up." A beat, he's studying the younger female's face, tracking her eyes toward the bar. There's a cough. He passes her back a shawl with a pointed look that doesn't quite sit on his rugged features; handsome, though. Underneath the tired eyes and scruff and the softening paunch; still a handsome man.

Built from strong stuff, that was most of those from the mountains.

"Don't stay out too late."

She leaves a little red smear of lipstick on his cheek as they part ways and it's Kiara alone, eventually, the staccato clip of her black pumps against the pavement that finds the gathering, adjusting the strap of her little evening purse over a shoulder.

Elijah

"Yeah, she's covered. It's cool. She doesn't want to drop her whole life because bad shit happened. Like, I get that. I don't know when shit's going to blow over and you can't stop living your life because there's a possibility something horrific is going to happen," he sighs. Hard, harsh. Ah, that is what has stressed him out. "I've asked? But Jenn is not down with the whole witness protection spiel beyond what Mike's already done."

A beat.

"Mike's a wheel turning kind of guy," shrugs, that's all he says on the matter. "He's, like, the most weirdly honest person I've ever encountered. Once shit blows over I'm totally buying him a bowl of pho or a beer or something."

Dan is coming across the street though and he smiles, bright, gives a wave, but it's his turn to make the puppy dog expression, head cocks to the side and looks at Dan like he doesn't quite understand what he means that he's out here by himself.

"S'just me and Sera and Sid," he gestures to the dog, "that's Sid. I think you have a new housemate."

Serafíne

WHAT THINGS DO I FEEL. (Awareness)

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 3, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 5 ) [Doubling Tens]

Serafíne

So now: Elijah and Sera on the sidewalk and Dan closing the distance to Elijah, giving the young man a still, level sort of look that hooks his breath somewhere in the center of his body. He glances at at Kiara and gives her wave of greeting. Gaze snags on the retreating frame of the strange from whom she's parting, something about the set of his shoulders or -
- but no. Dan's blue eyes drop to Elijah and he sinks into a crouch. The sort of crouch an adept adult of some authority takes when speaking with a child in the midst of a tragedy. Getting on his level. "Sera's with you?" Looks up from Elijah, searching the empty space beside him like he's trying to trace out her outline against the pitted brick wall of the Stone Pony. Breathes out, softly.

Swears, beneath his breath.

And Sera can feel Kiara, the moving pulse of her energy, breathes that in feels it mingle strangely with her blown-out senses, breathes it in and in and in again, like maybe she'll never have to breathe the other way. Except: she always does.

But there's Dan. She's looking at him and can't quite look away, all snagged. "He can't see me." Sera murmurs to Elijah. She could shout, though, all she fucking wanted. Doesn't have to be quiet about a thing. "None of them can."

(Oh god, she's: drunk and god-knows-what-else and something hitches inside her like whoa.)

Elijah

[Manip+sub, I totally did not just say I saw Serafine.]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 6, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

Elijah

There is this horrible moment when Elijah realizes that he can see and hear Serafine.

Dan can not see and hear Serafine. She says nobody can hear her, or see her for that matter.

Now, there is a moment when Elijah has this dawning horror that there is a very real possibility that Serafine, the woman without a last name, is very much dead and he's seeing and hearing her because Elijah Poirot is a person who sees and hears dead people. This is not uncommon. There have been instances where it has been slightly more difficult to pick voices out in a room and tell which of them belong to bar patrons and which of them belong to people who are no longer people in the strictest of senses.

Usually, when he says shit like this, people ask him if he's on his medication (he's not) and try to determine whether or not he is hallucinating and a danger to himself or others.

So: Dan gets this.

"It's just one of those nights that you feel like you're with a person, that kind of persistent idea," he says, like it's an apology, "I don't know, it feels like..."

He sighs, runs his hands through his hair but stops where she might still be making contact because he doesn't want to brush her away. He's totally not going to be the one who tells Dan that Serafine is dead. He's trying very hard to spare him that information.

Which is good, because Serafine is very much not dead.

Kiara

The Verbena arrives somewhere between Dan dropping to his haunches and Serafine informing Elijah that Dan can't see her. That she's a phantom to them. Kiara's curling the edges of her shawl around her arms; winding it through and there's a little glossy program twisted in one hand. Something about a gallery showing - makes sense.

The dress, the complicated messy updo she's managed with her dark hair; it sits with strands framing her cheekbones. The cut of it, a v neck that highlights her lean frame, there's a lone pendant around her neck on a thin silver chain; crystal, it looks. Cut into a thin shape with a pointed edge and maybe once, something like it would have been enough to draw sidelong glances.

Murmurs and certain assumptions (hell, maybe it still does in the right company).

"Hey." She greets, her heel scraping against the ground as she comes upon them. She's wearing some vaguely sweet perfume the brunette. Her dark eyes swinging down and they fix, of course, on Elijah's company. Trace over (thin air). People spill out, talking about the music and Kiara's eyes shift to them for a beat as Elijah is saying -

"What's going on?" - Sharper, that. Kiara's voice comes out a little too punctuated, she's staring down at Elijah, now. The edges of her generous mouth pinching into a frown; brows constricting.

Serafíne

"I know what's going on, Elijah. Pan explained it to me. I just - " Dan is still crouched on his haunches, skinny jeans pulled tight across his knees, hands braced on his thighs, weight balanced, only so. Looks tired, sad, maybe a little bit strained but he is also trying not to look like any of those things and trying not to draw too much attention from his friends (and SERA'S FRIENDS) over there chatting and buying donuts.
"She's supposed to be staying with a friend of Pan's." Neat glimpse up then, this grimace of greeting when Kiara walks up to them. "I don't think it's a good idea for her to be here. Right now it's only going to hurt her."
Then he looks past Elijah, not really close to picking out Sera's place beside Elijah against the wall. "I'm sorry."
(Sera has, in the interim, buried her head in her knees. Sid kinda stirs but Dan doesn't notice the dog either, even as the dog gives a hopefully-comforting thump-thump-thump of its tail.)
--
Kiara asks what's going on, maybe she's asking Elijah but Dan knows what's going on. "Sera got hit with paradox, or something. She can only communicate with people who are Awake. She's invisible to everyone else. "
"I should probably go." Before more folks come over and make the whole thing stranger and harder and more terrible and more remarkably ordinary: talking about the band, eating donuts, chatting about the party at so-and-so's tomorrow night, or such-and-such's dislocated elbow at the last Derby meet, and on and on and on. Unless someone stops him, off he goes.

Elijah

"That... is so much better than what I thought it was," he looks at Dan, puts a hand on the back of his head and leans in to kiss him on the forehead. The gesture is one that bleeds off a very real, very palpable amount of tension that the young man was feeling. Pan explained what was going on to Dan. Dan knew Serafine wasn't dead, and right now this is absolute news to Elijah.

Dan explains what's going on and Elijah eventually lets go of the other man so he can actually leave, Elijah leans a little against Serafine, kisses her on the head, too, because she was there and she was alive and Kiara is there and she seems concerned but Elijah, for his part, was decidedly less stressed out because, obviously, while one of his friends was in mortal peril right now one of his other friends was very much assuredly not dead and this was a blessing.

"Sera's not a restless spirit," he tells Kiara, like this is fantastic news.

He curls in, content to stay on one side for the time being. Content to stay at Sera's side and doesn't say anything. Runs his fingers through her hair and doesn't know what to say to her. The world is passing around her, and she's an observer right now. People are moving on without her, and that is a painful place to be.

Kiara

There's this little moment where Kiara's features harden into something quite furious and angry. This moment where her spine straightens and her shoulders round back and she's got this gleam in her eyes that's all agitation. Her mouth thins into this little seam and she's staring down at the ground for a second as if she cannot for all her days quite decide what to do with that.

The anger. Not at Elijah, not at Dan. Not at Serafine, but - "Fuck." She lets out this little catch, her eyes closing and she turns her face into the distance, frowning hard.

Serafine's head is between her knees when she manages to compose herself enough to look back and then Dan is leaving and Kiara makes this tiny motion; a uncurling of her fingers as if she wants to say something to the man to comfort him because his friend is invisible, but how do you offer comfort for that. Where is the damn rule book for friends of those removed from your sight by paradox?

"We'll take care of her, Dan."

It's a quiet, futile thing to say and Kiara seems to know it. She does move, though. Wedges herself down near the Cultist and folds the edges of her dress between her knees, presses her shoulder against the other woman and says in this furious, vibrant undertone. "You're going to be okay, you know. Screw the universe. You'll be fine. I missed you."

That's futile too, but maybe it's also enough. She says, after a beat: "I have a spare room. If you want somewhere to be, you can stay there. Anytime."

Serafíne

Elijah kisses Dan on the brow and the older man allows it, gives this twinge of a not-quite-smile through his beard and returns half the gesture: reaching to cup the back of the young Hermetic's skull with tattooed hands. Then he lets Elijah go and pushes himself upright. Shares a grimace of something (and maybe anger is the right response to this bullshit, but it is rather difficult to work his way through his very real concern to something that bright and righteous. And then there are Dee and Rick on the other side, absolutely in the dark, both kinda angry with Sera instead of for her, because for them the absence is total, is the story of Sera's semi-regular disappearances from their lives and some of the committments she makes in them: like really making a go of the band, you know, that one.

Fuck.

But, he straightens. Says, "Thank you," quietly and simply to Kiara and turns on his heel to cross the street to the food truck and as he goes he's getting out his phone, texting or maybe calling someone. And he doesn't want to look back, is telling himself not to but he cannot help it, as if he might someone turn his head fast enough to catch a glimpse of her and then hold her in his gaze.

--

Kiara wedges herself down between Sera and an adolescent dog with a spiked-leather collar who was laying down but sits up and puts her chin on her paws as Kiara sits. Thumpthumpthump goes Sid Vicious' tail.

Sera sits there, her shoulders move like bellows, but without the regularity of tears. Those are just great-big-breaths she is taking, maybe to steady herself, maybe to feel her body open up, maybe because they make her ribcage seem like it is being pried open and she would rather feel that physically than the other way it sometimes happens, the cracked ribs and the marrow within. Or maybe she's doing that to try to keep from throwing up.

And she finally lifts her head from her knees, hair sliding through Elijah's fingers and she gives Kiara this quick tight smile of gratitude. Oughta say screw the universe, I'll be just fine right along with her but she can't say either. She is: a hungry ghost of a thing, and she wasn't made for silence, or anything like it. "My phone doesn't fucking - "

One of her arms unfurls from around her legs, she makes a loose gesture, "work." No selfies. No texting. No Ginger, no nothing. "And I don't - I don't even know where you live."

Elijah

He's there, and he's trying to process, can't imagine what this is like for Dan. Can't imagine what this is like for Dee or Rick, either. Because they have no idea, just know that she isn't there anymore and doesn't know what they know about what but he presumes the answer is nothing. He presumes the answer is nothing and it doesn't drive a complete wedge in Serafine's friendship with them.

He doesn't know what to say. Doesn't know how to say it, either, only that he is glad she is alive. Only glad that she is a presence, even if it is a presence that is stuck between the worlds.

A second, then?

"You know, I could text people for you if somebody else can make your phone work. You just... y'know... gotta get people to do your communication by proxy," he says. Leans a little into her but then realizes that's not enough independence.

"We can make things work out."

Resolute. Because, if he said this, it obviously can be willed into being. They can make things work out, it would just take time.

Kiara

There's a cat on the second floor of Kiara Woolfe's apartment building that follows her on occasion. Sees the brunette passing and uncurls itself, stretches and arches its spine and slinks along with a chiming bell as its herald to wind around her legs when she passes. Sometimes, it happens. Other times - there's a dog walked in Washington Park that nearly threw itself at her; frothing and snarling.

They sense it, sometimes. What she is, that delicate twinge to the order of the universe. Sid, like the cat on the second floor, sits up and pays attention - Kiara's fingers reach out and ghost over his head, her fingernails scratching behind an ear.

There's a flash of a smile at Elijah over Serafine's head; bracketed in there between the pair of them as she is; a sliver of gratitude. A little indication of her approval, because: "Well that's just plain rude." A curl of amusement, a husk of wry humor in the pagan's voice as she unclasps the little purse she's had with her all night; the outside glitters with tiny black beads and inside there's a fold of notes, a credit card and a few loose dockets for who knew what.

She extricates a pen, Kiara. Uncaps it with the lid held between her teeth and scribbles down on the back of a take out receipt her address. "817 17th St, Bank and Boston Lofts. Apartment ... 422." She shakes it out to dry the ink a little and then holds it out to Serafine, her dark eyes roving her face.

"Whenever." She lets her gaze tick past her to Elijah and her mouth curls a little, because: has she seen Elijah since they'd returned? Days bleed together and its disjointed and odd to her, not a student of Time, but: she loses track.

The when, the where. "Hey, kid." Soft and easy, as if it were any other night and she'd caught sight of Elijah in a crowd. Never mind the universe.

Serafíne

Sera bumps Elijah back and doesn't really say much. Pressure there, acknowledgment, awareness. He's so damned optimistic it makes her spine feel brighter and she could tell him that it's not the same, because it isn't, but he says it so resolutely that she doesn't. Somewhere in the middle of all this she turns and cups his head and kisses him firmly on the temple like she's comforting him not the other way around.

Then Kiara is scribbling out her address on a receipt, waiting for the ink to dry, handing the piece of paper to Sera who is drunk enough that she has to do a single and then a double-take as her focus narrows and then zippers open and then folds the receipt very, very neatly and lifts the fraying hem of her raveling cropped top and tucks the address into her lovely little black-lace bra.
Drifts for a while, after.
--
Not much later, a cab or maybe a solid and non-descript mid-price sedan pulls up. Luxury brand, probably, but not the sort one notices. The sort one doesn't-notice. The street is mostly empty and that's a no-parking zone right in front of them but it's late. No meter maids out. Doesn't matter that he's double-parked in front of a fire hydrant. A man Elijah knows, whom Kiara does not yet know (methinks?) gets out of the driver's side and circles the car. He's tall(ish), mid-30s, pale skin, dark hair. Greets Elijah. Greets the dog and she knows him enough to stir-to-life when he comes around. Introduces himself to Kiara, not formally because they are out in the open, but conveys enough about himself that she can guess his tradition and rank from his words, demeanor, and resonance.

Offers Sera a hand-up and she takes it and she doesn't wanna go,
but she does anyway.

Isolation.

Michael

Previously:

Pan drove Sera fifteen hours from Los Angeles to Denver. Fifteen hours not including all the times they stopped. Fifteen hours where they had all the time in the world to talk and argue. Some semblance of argument. Pan proving what an overprotective father type he can be when he gets it into his head to be.

Just before the Colorado state line they came to a draw: he was not going to take her to Hawksley's mansion. He was not going to dump her on Kalen and Grace's front lawn. He was not going to have the Euthanatos handcuff her to the radiator until she felt better.

They reached the Denver city limits and a sense of sobriety came over the priest. Part of him wanted to set aside his life back in Los Angeles just to stay a while and help. The better part of him knew that they did not need him. Not like his congregation needed him.

So Pan made a phone call to his associate and his associate gave him an address and Pan drove to that address. He parked the car in the garage and put his arm around Sera's shoulders as he walked her towards the stairs.

--

They wait in the lobby of the Hotel Monaco for no longer than five minutes before the elevator dings with a car arriving. They open to reveal a tall man with fair skin and dark hair. He wore the remnants of a three-piece suit trousers and belt and dress shirt. He is handsome and Sera can tell before he opens his mouth that he is a friendly sort.

His resonance feels like unraveling. Like steadiness. Like a storm. No Jhor stains either his resonance or his soul. A rarity in his tradition.

They greet each other as "Father Echeverría" and "Mike." Pan introduces her as "My friend, Serafíne" and him as "My stock broker, Michael." 'Stock broker' appears to be a joke. 'My friend' does not.

Serafíne

Nobody is looking at her. Strangers should be staring, you know? The heady gut-punch of her resonance, the way she looks, the way she dresses, the way she exists in the world: she was made to see and be seen, if anyone ever was.

Pan draws looks, sure. Strangers, businessmen, engineers, doctors in town for the upper GI conference, CEOs in for a meeting of shareholders, oil company execs hoping to do something, anything, to stem some of the losses. Wait: they're not actually losing money now. Making a bit less, sure. So: Pan draws glances, some people want to bask in that light, others want to shield their eyes, others want to hide, but no one looks at him the way they'd look at her.

If they could see her.

Which they can't.

--

Our Sera settled into circle of Pan's arm as if it were natural that they walk together like that. More than natural: she needed the contact after the brief stop at 719 Corona Street. God that made her sad. In the bedroom upstairs Dan packed what he thought she'd want into a twee little vintage hard-sided suitcase right down to the stuffed rabbit left to nap forlorn in the middle of her empty bed all the time she was gone and talked to her like she was there and she was, and she could hear everything he said to her and it made her want to cry when she saw his uncertainty, the concern she could do nothing to dispel.

So she cried some more than they had to sit in the parking garage for a little while before she was feeling up to getting out of Pan's car. Doesn't want him to go.

Knows he has to.

--

"Hey." IT IS NOT HER FRIENDLIEST GREETING. Sera gives Michael a banked look and a twist of a sort-of-smile that ends with twist of her closed mouth. "This is Sid."

Maybe he didn't notice the dog until she introduced it, but there it is, tail thumping a subdued but suitably eager greeting.

"You can call me Sera. Everyone does." A neat little look sideways, no point rehashing those arguments, traces of her tears still evident on her face.

Michael

Pan hugged Dan on the way out of 719 Corona Street. Didn't force it on him but he has a sense about moments that call and do not call for two people to embrace and informing a man that his best friend had come back from a failed Seeking incapable of making herself known to Sleepers and needed her things so an associate of his could keep an eye on her for an indeterminate amount of time seemed to him that exact sort of situation.

He would have stayed if he thought it was in her best interests. He does not.

So he leaves her with Mike. Sera is not at her most friendliest but he expects nothing out of her. A brief flinch of surprise but that surprise sublimates into being charmed. He gives the dog consensual scratches behind his ears and under his chin and rubs his belly if the invitation is extended.

"Sera," Mike says. Bright in tone but not obnoxious. He can sense the intensity of the impending departure and the weight of the circumstances that have brought Sera here. "I think I will. Father, thank you, again."

This, about something else. The two men clasp hands and shake before embracing again. Pan turns to Sera and gives her the tightest hug he has ever given her. One as if in expectation of this being the last time. A hand at the back of her head and a kiss to her forehead.

He has always loved her like a daughter.

And the priest is gone not long after that. Mike waiting with his eyes aimed down as if to afford them their privacy. After a time he picks up Sera's suitcase.

Life goes on around them.

Serafíne

God, she hugs him back. Doesn't want to let him go once he pulls her in like that so she balls up her fists like she could go a round or two boxing with the universe, first knock out wins. We see how that goes. And she can't stop time but she can: dilate it, right? unloop and unwhorl it, spool out seconds into seconds into memories of seconds and she could right now, but she doesn't, thinks of it, doesn't. Maybe it happens like that in memory.

Somehow Sera manages not to cry until Pan cups her skull and kisses her on her brow.

Over her third eye.

--

Even then it's something she's holding on to, holding back from, shuddering with rather than letting-go-of. Sid whines a bit, gives these experimental thumps of her tail, wants the Person to not-cry and bumps her big head against Sera's right thigh to tell her so.

Michael picks up her suitcase and Sera was going to. But he's done it so, she breathes in, still those sort-of-crying breathes, shaking inhales and shuddering exhales and it is difficult to see someone like that, right? red-eyed with grief, emotion, the raw, unvarnished darkness of it laid flat out before you, but the stranger gives her some privacy and Sera in her way is grateful.

Doesn't say anything. How do you make small talk after that?

She follows him back into the elevator, and Sid comes with, toenails clicking on the floor.

Somewhere between the 14th and the 22nd floor, though, "You take in alot of strays?"

People, she means. Not dogs.

Michael

In the presence of a weaker member of another tradition that may have been the case. She may have met with a person who could not weather the rawness of her capacity for Passion. He could weather it. If she had come at him as a stranger and laid her grief upon him Michael would not have shied away from it.

Still: he grants them their moment. He is still there when they are finished embracing. He holds to the silence when Sera does not speak.

If the dog is amenable Mike scratches Sid beneath his jowls as the elevator ascends.

You take in a lot of strays?

That strikes him as humorous. Not riotously so. But he huffs out an amused breath with the inquiry and then stops to consider the question.

"I was one, once," he says. "Now that you mention it..."

Serafíne

"Fuck." Under-her-breath, raw-and-quiet. If there is humor here, it is of the gallows sort and Sera is in a needling mood. Needs it as an antidote, perhaps, to all that rawness. Doesn't mind vulnerability of all sorts, but is also remarkably private. "Most of us were. Not that many to-the-manor-born."

--

Dark eyes lift; she's not looking at him, precisely, so much as the gleaming confines of the elevator, their reflections in the muted polish of the wood-and-chrome. Trying to imagine herself erased from the scene and still present. Ugh, creepy.

"What did Pan tell you about me?"

Michael

"No. Absolutely. You're right."

He doesn't seem as if he's trying to appease her. As if he knows anything about her situation or her struggles or the path upon which she's embarked. For all she knows he doesn't.

For all she knows he is used to dealing with the spirits of those who have gone onto the other side. He is used to speaking to those who are trapped in a past life as if he never left. The Euthanatos are a strange breed.

He is looking up at the floor indicator before she asks what Pan told Mike about her. He glances over at her curious and contained at once and then he looks straight ahead at the closed doors.

When he speaks he does not have an accent. Maybe a bit of Chicago clinging to his intonation but what Sera may notice more than that is his sense of elocution and diction. If he has an accent he can work around it.

"That you were a friend. That you knew the city well." A beat. An omission. A prelude to a joke? It could go either way. This guy seems earnest. "He didn't tell me so much as he threatened me with bodily and spiritual harm should anything happen to you while you were in my care."

Serafíne

Sera is about to ask a Euthanatos Adept whether or not anyone has ever mistaken him for a Mormon. Something about the combination of straight-up earnestness with a suit. She's just gearing up for it because she Does Not Want To Be Here and doesn't really have anywhere else to go.

But then the stranger tells her that Pan didn't so much tell him as threaten him with bodily and spiritual harm and she breathes out a kind of hooked, hitched breath. Almost a laugh, but ugh, she wants to cry again.

"I've got a place. With my friends, bandmates. Sleepers can't see me right now, though, so Pan didn't want me to stay there while this - "

Shuddering breath.

"While this lasts." Trying not to entertain the possibility that it could be permanent. "He's probably right. I'm sorry if I'm being a fucking asshole. This just sucks."

Michael

"Are you being a fucking asshole?"

This question posed in total honesty. He actually pulls his gaze away from the reflective doors to look over at Sera. Down at the dog. Encapsulate the both of them in his photographic memory in case it comes up again he can call back on an image of her being an asshole.

"I didn't think you were."

Serafíne

The creature gives a neat little shrug, refusing responsibility for any piece of it.

Changes the subject, even, as the elevator levels up with Michael's floor and the doors sigh open.

"You're alot less creepy than I thought you'd be. I really hope there's a mini bar in your room."

Michael

So they settle it. He hadn't realized she was being an asshole. If she was she isn't going to own it. The elevator opens its maw and reveals a throwback of a corridor. Dark carpet and mustard-colored walls. No sign of the outside world aside from a window at either end allowing in the sunlight and he isn't as creepy as Sera thought he would be.

Even if she were to watch the weaving of his Work Sera would find no sign of Jhor. The Death Taint. That is rare among his tradition especially as powerful as he feels.

Her statement does not amuse him near as much as the initial statement had. He can appreciate why she asks it though. He is self-possessed but not unaware.

"There is," he says. "You're welcome to it."

Serafíne

"See, I am being a fucking asshole."

This sad, wry curve to her mouth. She precedes Michael out of the elevator and swings away from him, wandering down the hallway with Sid pacing at her Sid. They move in such strange sync, the slight girl (who is, Michael can see as she walks ahead of him, sporting a thoroughly bedraggled plush panda backpack on her back, over her oversized leather coat, band t-shirt, denim cut-offs, fishnets and curb-stomping boots.

Has this gait like she's eight feet tall.

Even now.

Maybe, especially now.

--

He stops in front of the suite. She leans back against the door, watches him as he pulls out the keycard and reaches for the doorknob as the light turns green, pushes the door back, open, in. Has this scrubbed-raw feeling about her then that feels unflinchingly open, delicate, aggressive all-at-once.

"I'm sorry. I'm usually only an asshole to asshole. You're just caught in the crossfire. Probably a pretty stand-up guy for doing this."

This grimacing, brave little smile before she turns around, ducks and heads inside.

"I just really want my friends, you know?"

Doesn't say much more. Follows wherever he takes her suitcase. Unlatches it and starts unpacking, or "unpacking" then hides away in her room. Doesn't say much more. Isn't much for small talk, right now. Hates hates hates sleeping alone,

but she does, tonight. And probably for many nights hereafter.

Bittersweet

Dan

Bittersweet is a slow pour coffeehouse / mixology bar tucked away on a corner of LoDo, with a changing 'gallery' of local art on the walls. This month, the featured artist is Tish Evans, a local weaver / textile artist whose work spans the functional and the fantastical. The largest piece is a wall-hanging the size of a small buffalo like a sunset woven in negative: shadows where light should be, and light where the shadows belong.

Leonard Cohen on the soundsystem (Nevermind) and a low buzz of noise from the small crowd. They do a bang-up business mornings and weekends, but mid-evening - when local bar/restaurants are crowded enough to spill out onto the street on a warm October night - the coffee bar / bar bar (and that is what the sign outside says:

bittersweet

coffee bar / bar bar

) - is sparsely populated. Among the denizens: a bearded blond guy with a button-down flannel, the sleeves rolled quite neatly up to his elbows revealing a variety of intricate tattoos, portfolio open on the table, frowning at his Macbook, drinking coffee from a ceramic mug.

River

River was doing as River is want to do right now- which was exploring.

She knew the lay of the land, for the most part. Kept an ear to the ground so she would know which gang was where and whose turf she needed to stay out of. Where people dropped dead bodies in the event she needed to go and be an investigator. In the event she needed to stand on her own two feet. River's had her fill of dead things- she wants coffee. Contemplates being a barrista instead of a dancer and there she goes, pushes the door open with a jingle and she's got on a pair of shorts paired with cowbox boots. The shirt is a little long for her, button down and probably belonging to an ex-boyfriend.

She's got on a vest and carries a purse that is the size of a small duffelbag. It houses a world of wonders and her dakr hair is worn down. This place was a coffee bar and an actual bar. She contemplates mixing both before she sees the man with the blond beard. Hasn't she seen him before.

River makes a tentative approach, tries to act cool, like she's not trying to check Dan out. Maybe failing. Probably failing.

Aidan

[nightmares]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

Dan

What's the point of checking someone out if they don't notice and return the look? Maybe there's a certain aesthetic appreciation there. Maybe some folks don't want to get caught. Most do, though. How else do you know if your regard might be returned?

--

He glances up. Blue eyes framed with slight crinkles that deepen when his mouth moves, as it does not, in a brief skimming grin. Notes the bag.

"That thing looks big enough to carry around three cases of beer or a side of beef."

Wry.

He looks tired, though.

He is tired.

Kiara

One of those days. That's what it is.

The weather doesn't offer a backdrop for it, not really. It's been cloudy all afternoon but the Denver wind hasn't taken up the mantle some locals have; pumpkins starting to dot porches with their garish, grinning smiles cut wide across their sides. It's not freezing, it just feels - a little heavy. Dull and gritty where the sun slides away and even when it returns - Denver today - feels like a city with secrets. It doesn't always.

Sometimes, on evenings like the one it's settling into, it feels - promising. Those secrets, the unknowns, they feel like an enticement to come along (come find us).

-

She almost collided with another car earlier. Intersection. Palms slammed down on horns. Guy cutting her off (and nearly cutting a slice out of her car). Then her engine stalled. One of those days. She had to circle the block twice to find a park so she could make a meeting.

-

She passes a crime scene on the way to find this mixology bar she's wanted to try forever. There's police tape flapping in the evening air and the sight of the lights (cutting blue and red, blue and red) against the windows is a strange visual tattoo against the night.

There's a crowd milling around, curious stares and quiet chatter as an ambulance rolls around a corner.

Kiara picks up her pace. She's around the corner before it pulls to a stop.

-

One of those days, now - evening. The Verbena finds Bittersweet on foot. One minute there's no sign of her and then; the door opens; a swirl of perfume and energy and red lipstick. Kiara Woolfe, adjusting her bag over her shoulder and frowning at the menu.

Kiara

[Oh right! Awareness, just in case.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )

River

"Sometimes, I like to carry a keg with me," she adjusts her purse, switches it over to the other shoulder, "true facts."

She sounds like she's not from here, or at the very least like she's not one who speaks English as a first language. Truth be told, River is from here, was born in the United States but she's spent enough time outside of the standard English-speaking populace that she doesn't have the same cadence and timbre of a native speaker.

"Can I buy you a coffee?" looks at the mug, realizes he has coffee, looks back and offers a smile anyway, as if smiling would cover up the fact that she completely missed he was drinking coffee before, "I'm River."

Dan

"False lies," he rejoins, this quick skim of a smile cutting through his beard. It reaches - but only just - his dark blue eyes. Watching as she shifts that purse, his eyes cutting across her frame - hand to strap to hand again - with a light precision that strikes one as aware rather than observant. "Now if you'd said a half-keg I might've believed you."

And so. Mouth slides from that into a slight smirk as she offers to buy him a coffee and yes, he already has coffee. Wasn't simply here to steal their wifi and he thinks about telling her that, but he doesn't.

Cuts a glance down at his mug like: yeah. "I already have one. You're welcome to buy yourself a coffee and pull up a chair, though."

--

Then he's sitting back in that chair, this long spare frame, button-down and fitted jeans and leather boots. Sits back enough and tall enough to catch Kiara's eye. Gives her a wave that could be taken as an invitation, if she's looking for one.

Kiara

So, Bittersweet. She takes two steps inside and nearly collides with a young man on his way out. It's Kiara's fault this time, she's staring down at her phone and tapping out some (vitally important no doubt) message with the fall of all that long, dark hair tumbling over a shoulder and then - jostled. She looks up, startled and is reaching to apologize when he's doing the same; adjusting glasses up a thin nose and waving her apology off, because - well - it's probably the eyes and the hair.

It usually was, with the pagan.

Still, she's breathing out and pushing back all that hair with a bracelet-laden wrist when she spots (feels that resolute splash of radiance) Dan and the hand flowers out. He gets a smile and she nods toward the bar - universal I'm going to order first gesture - before she's moving. Kiara often seems to be perpetually doing that. In motion. Moving. (Running).

She's in jeans and boots and a calf length cream trench-coat, the brunette; the bag over her shoulder is old and worn and looks battle-scarred; it's stitched at one edge; there's a feather attached to the zip.

-

Returns to greet Dan and - "River, right?" - A gesture with her coffee, Kiara's dark eyes find the other woman. "Did your pants pull through?" Smilingly, a curl at the edge of her mouth.

River

She does take the invitation, does take a moment to order coffee- vanilla chai latte- waits with the kind of careful patience that one has to have when ordering nice coffee. It comes out in an avocado mug with a nice, open top. As though she were going to read tea leaves in her oversized beverage receptacle.

She turns around, catches a look at Kiara and smiles. Raises a hand and with a little wiggle of her fingers lets the woman know that, yes, she sees her. With the curve of her lips (full, unpainted, she lets the woman know that she is pleased to see her. The first person whose name she remembered in this city. A woman, most importantly, who wasn't going to hold a pair of ripped yoga pants against her because River can be a walking ball of embarrassment waiting to happen.

She sits down, "Aaaand... Kiara?"

Waits for confirmation.

Did your pants pull through?

And this is the part where her cheeks turn bright pink. She clears her throat, takes a long drink of her coffee-infused chai drink and she sets it down. Hands on her glass, "oh, uh... no? The yoga pants sleep with the fishes."

Dan

The tables are only so large, and his is more-or-less full. The open portfolio (leather, quite as scarred as Kiara's bag) is closed with a neat sweep of his tattooed hand. This glimpse of scrawled notes, a handful of suggestions of chord progressions, little more. Then he folds up the Macbook and tucks both away in his own rather indispensible bag. Battered black leather, a Ramones pin naturally skewered through one of the stresspoints to either hide or hold together the largest of the holes where the leather and its lining have worn-through.

Leaves his phone on the table, though, Dan. He's waiting for a call.

Still gives them both a quick-wry-smirk, more for Kiara in that moment than for River - but that's familiarity, more than anything. The function of it. "There some particular reason you are throwing yoga-pants into the river?" (Sleep with the fishes, see). Gets a glimpse of River's frothy coffee-thing, "Is it the coffee you like in that, or the rest of it?"

Kiara

River's embarrassed and Kiara's smile grows a little at the edges. She's taken her coffee black - perhaps that says enough. Still, when she says the pants sleep with the fishes, there's a flash of sympathy there. She makes a soft noise of it as she finds a chair - maybe hooks in one from another table if room is too cramped - and settles in this flourish.

Bag hung over the back, legs neatly crossing at the knee. Those boots, which have rather a tendency toward complicated laces that criss-cross up the length and a zip that runs along the side - those are black too.

"Technically, it's all your fault, Dan." She begins with a pointed little lift of fine dark brows. "We were playing the game you started and River here went for a spectacular throw," River gets the benefit of Kiara's eyes, then. They tick over to her and she delivers this little wink with her mouth still edging that little flux of teasing humor before continuing, raising her coffee to her mouth to sip from it when she concludes.

"And gravity took offense to her prowess. And Alexander's, as it turned out."

A beat, she swallows. Contemplates Dan for a brief pull. "Hey, how's Sera?"

River

"The rest of it. I like chai, but I like chai that lives dangerously. I don't like the coffee aftertaste- espresso lollipops, jelly beans, tiramisu-" she makes a face, nose scrunches up and she shakes her head, "-I like covert coffee."

But there was the question fo the yoga pants, realizing she didn't really carefully dodge that particular question well enough, River clears her throat. Tried to think of a witty reply but, at the end of the day, she's not the best with witty repartee; she's average. Honesty is the best policy and she meanders to her point.

Kiara covers this rest of the story and here she is trying to hide behind her coffee cup but it wasn't working. So! The Euthanatos, who was supposed to be bestowed with the kind of dignity befitting a wheel turner, cleared her throat and relaxed. Or tried to relax and ended up cross her legs to keep from figiting too bad. "When I got home they had unraveled to the point of being leg warmers so... they have failed me for the last time."

Dan

"When gravity fucks you over - " he is not precisely laughing, but there is humor in his lengthy frame, skimming over his underlying - what is it. Tension? Something like it. "Disbelieve."

Still though: the reference to the game, et cetera. His gaze slides from Kiara to River and there is a different note: first seeking, then recognition. One fits itself into the other, like a placing of puzzle pieces. "That's where I've seen you before."

River is confessing to enjoying covert coffee then: so Dan does not suggest that next time she's here she try a plain, slow-poured something. You're a coffee person on you aren't. River doesn't seem to be. Dan's so hipster it hurts, right? But he's not an ass about it.

--

Then Hey, how's Sera? flick of his gaze back to Kiara and something like hang-time there. A second really, no more. And it is not so much that tension asserts itself, as it is a lessening of his temporary ease. "Tan, I suppose. Last I heard from her, she was still in Thailand."

Kiara

The talk of coffee pulls at a thread of memory. Corona Street, not so long ago, but months, now. Kiara hadn't been in Denver so long and there was a party - Dan had quizzed her on her preferences and she remembers it now in that abstract, fuzzy-at-the-edges like an old photograph way:

(French press or drip?

Press.

Woman after my own heart)

There's some awareness of that time in Kiara's expression as she watches Dan and in the way her mouth adjusts itself into something a little less joyful. Just - aware. Not without concern, perhaps. Somewhere tied into it. "She does love the sun. Why am I not surprised?"

Then, simple: "If you hear from her, tell her I said I want a souvenir. Something cheap and ridiculous."

Maybe she's been letting River recover her dignity, but Kiara's eyes return to her, now. "How is your friend? I got the impression she wasn't totally sold on whether or not I planned to do something dastardly with you both the other night?"

Dan

His mouth quirks, Dan, this glimmer of affection, yeah, or maybe respect framing the edges of the expression, which is otherwise banked and closed but not shuttered. "Will do." is the only assurance he offers Kiara.

He appreciates, though, her circumspection.

And sentiment.

--

Hangs around a little while longer, more background than foreground. Excuses himself to take a call not long after. Steps away and outside, where he digs through pockets and pulls out a kretek. Not a habit he indulges in much, except when Sera's around, but now he smokes it while he chats.

Later he might return. If River or Kiara or both are still there, he might suggest that they meet up later. Friend of his is playing at The Black Sheep - the set'll start about 10 if they're interested.

--

Not-Seeking

honest gods

For no reason to which she can ascribe not that reason has any place in magick not when magick comes from blood and breath and desperation not when she can call down the fury of time with a terror-spawned scream but for no reason just after Sera swallows those three seeds an echo of a voice crawls inside her head. Maybe it was something she heard once. An earworm. It doesn't loop in on itself and it doesn't get stuck there. Passes like incense smoke heavy and sharp before dissipating again.

What I destroy you no longer need.

Her sense of time is gone. Her sense of place is strong. She knows where she is. Still has her name. A name. A name she chose but a name all the same.

The guy on the scooter is a little taller than seems practical for the scooter but his narrow limbs and long thin neck give him a sort of grace his baggy linen pants and tunic threaten to occlude. Emaciated sure but Sera's is a practice of deprivation and she is used to wasting herself.

This entire time she has not been able to make sense of the clocks. Even the time on her phone is a haze. No way to say for sure when she received messages or when she responded to them. It doesn't matter anyway.

Her arms around his waist and she feels the distension of his midsection. How empty it is how full of air and hunger. Rests her chin on his shoulder and feels the leather quality of the skin beneath the linen. Hard bone beneath hard skin. Lets the world warp and it does warp the guy longs for speed and the scooter can only go so fast. A little under 65kph with the two of them both of them insubstantial and if the thought occurs to her at any point that she cannot describe his face that is not just the seeds she took. His face is no clearer an image in her memory than the faces of the clocks and the watches. Than the faces of the figures in the airway nights and days ago.

A turn. Another. Another. The scooter merges with fast traffic. Even if she looks Sera cannot make out the faces of the people in the vehicles either. They're going too fast.

ถนน ซุปเปอร์ไฮเวย์ เชียงใหม่-ลำปาง

So says the road sign in its native script.

CHIANG MAI SUPERHIGHWAY - LAMPANG

So says the road sign through the lens of her reality.

They take the highway around the city out past the airport everything a blur her arms and limbs numb to her what she destroys she no longer needs and then the Su Thep forest appears to her right tall and

the guy is taller than he was when she climbed on behind him at the railway.

Their speed decreases. The road becomes dirt. The sun is dipping below the horizon. Lazy heat blanketing the world. Insects drone and the sound is nothing like a song. They sound like that woman she heard screaming in the night market.

Serafíne

Her chin sharp on the hard frame of his shoulder, her cheek soft against his ropey neck. Inhales the diesel fumes and road dust, the body odor and the shift of dandruff in his hair. The sour scent of hunger and she is used to both privation and indulgence. Finds herself in the same place with both, dizzying, reckless, scattered, unmoored.

Her own hair unfurls behind them like a tattered flag.

Warps and scatters, wild, settles and reforms as their speed changes.

--

The insects' screaming song makes her -

- shiver.

despite the thickwet heat of the rainforest.

--

It isn't that they never made Claire scream. Just: not when Sera was in the room. This is how it always came to her, from the slow-drone distance, the source obscured.

She would close her eyes,

and hurt.

You think you can't bear it, but you're wrong. You can. Sometimes, that is all you can do.

--

"Stop here," she tells him, as the sun disappears and the jungle canopy envelops. Mouth against his ear, feeling him open, lengthen. The blurred features of his face a tracery in her peripheral vision. Maybe it's the seeds.

She doesn't know.

She doesn't think so.

Fuck, maybe the seeds were a metaphor too.

"I'm gonna walk the rest of the way."

honest gods

Read it in the way his knob-sharp knees rise up gradual towards the scooter handles so gradual it's like melting in the setting sun the way his bones feel longer in the press of his ribs against her own thin chest a certain slant of shoulder blades beneath her own not like wings too thin and heavy at once they are not going to fly and she's gonna walk the rest of the way.

His nose and cheeks and chin are gray though night is not caught up to them yet. Not for some time. Though there's nothing wrong with her eyes or maybe there is something wrong with her eyes. She has been moving for some time and the movement forward is not hers now.

Can she see the spire at the top of the tower as they round the bend into the forest proper? Does it matter? The trees breathe their truths at her and the cicadas scream and Claire has been dead for some time.

Time doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot now that she's lost track of it. What time has destroyed she no longer needs.

Mouth against the guy's ear and time has destroyed him too. His skin is cool in spite of the heat. Cool and dry and the gray is not her imagination. She smells his clothes. Not him.

They putter along for another thirty seconds or so. Long enough for the path to give way to signs meant for motorists Thai and English chalked together. At least the motorists have not swallowed seeds.

ประกาศจะต้องไม่เกิดขึ้นใกล้กับแท่นบูชา

says the first sign she sees

THE ANNOUNCEMENT MUST NOT HAPPEN NEAR AN ALTAR

So they pass the sign. So the guy eases up on the gas. Motor muttering underneath the cicadas screams and the temple is still open to visitors and yet they pass no cars. No bicycles.

The hungry ghost brings the scooter to a halt on the side of the dirt road and the insects stop screaming.

Serafíne

What time has destroyed she no longer needs but Sera thinks that's bullshit because she still wants right. And wanting matters and time is bullshit and nothing is ever destroyed, just changed. She can swim back through and find it again.

And again and again and again, if she wants her heart broken and her body battered like that.

Sometimes, though, she doesn't mind.

--

So: gray. She smells his clothes, not him. Maybe she smells herself. How many days in the ugly little room, how many on the train, the hitch-hiking sway of her, her spine incising a negligent curve against the hard wooden lines of the second-class couchette. Feet up, eyes half-mast, notebook open in her lap. Nothing about her in that moment rich but everything indicative of luxury. All that time. Nothing to do in the world,

except: what she wants, when she wants, how she wants.

Thirty-six hours on a sway-backed train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai? Sure. Not like she has a job to go home too. Not like there are any claims on her time,

except her own.

--

They pass the sign. It makes her smile. She lifts her chin, catches a glimpse of the spire. Pins it, holds the spire in her gaze as the coughing moped decelerates and comes to a halt. Climbs off the bike and gives her driver this sweeping look. Takes in whatever it is she can of him. No life left at all.

"I think you should come with me."

She tells him. Holds out a warm hand.

honest gods

[PAUSE!]

honest gods

When the gray man stands from the scooter he takes his emptiness with him. Sharp knees come up near as high as Sera's waist and remain bent as his back as his shoulders all bone and sinew underneath the mummy-tough skin and she can make nothing of his face until he turns towards her nothing of the stringy hair hidden beneath a wide straw hat and she holds out his hand can hear a new kind of droning in the silence left behind by frightened wildlife.

Not droning. Chanting. It sounds like the Itipiso. A chorus of deep brassy voices and she knows the way she knows she needs air that the owners of the voices are not of this world.

The gray man's emptiness hangs beneath his tunic like a pregnancy swollen beyond the time it ought to have given way to life swollen and hanging low past his pelvis swaying as he moves and when he turns towards her well on his way to seven feet tall by now she can see that he has no face. Shadows where his features ought to be sure but the only feature that is not occluded by shadow is his mouth. Shriveled lips around a needle-wide orifice.

Even without touching them she can tell his fingers are not warm.

She thinks he should come with her.

He stands and holds to his silence. If he is not looking at her he is at least aware of her. Waiting for her. Spindly arms and long-long hands hung at his side.

Something rustles in the underbrush.

Serafíne

And Sera, she - watches - him as his frame unfolds itself from the scooter. She does this peripherally, even still. Dark eyes on her own hand, and then on his, withered, sharp and spindly. Then this ever widening sweep of a look, up and down, which has the periodic intonation, the widening sweep of a pendulum set to swinging until at last: his no-face, his shriveled mouth.

The chanting in the near distance sends a shiver spiking down her spine. She doesn't bother to hide it.

She wouldn't, would she.

--

Her gaze falls back to her half-open hand, its bristle of rings, one in bronze with a lingering resonance that is not-hers. Sera thinks for a moment, as she does sometimes. Thinks. She is not given to thought and her sharp features take on an almost comically serious cast for two seconds three, five. Then she takes that ring off. Wraps her left hand around her right index finger and slips it off. Opens her leather jacket and slips the bronze piece into a zippered inner pocket.

Startles, yeah, with the rustling in the underbrush, but does not go hying off after it.
Breathes, reminds herself to breathe, breathe, breathe -

- and starts walking.

--

Sera watches where she's going, sure and follows the road, at first. But she keeps looking up, skimming the shadowed canopy for another glimpse of that temple-spire.

honest gods

Easy to say that the path is open to her and the path is what she will have it be. That there is no path. That she is the path. That the temple offers nothing that she cannot find herself and so on and so forth.

But so soon as she starts to walk the path has made itself a difficulty. Canopies hang in the way and night falls faster than she might have thought it would. It is not yet autumn in the northern hemisphere. Thailand is in between rainy seasons. The canopy has grown no taller than it ever has been. Not like the hungry ghost that drove her here.

The hungry ghost follows her. What else is he supposed to do. He cannot satisfy the void he carries beneath his shirt.

Rustling in the underbrush and something falls out of the trees once she's passed by. Hidden by the fog and the shadows cut by the foliage. Moving along ancient-slow behind her the hungry ghost picks up the body of a flying lemur. It disappears in his hand and he brings his hand to his mouth and when he lowers his hand again it is empty.

Sera cannot see the temple spire for the trees. Their green hung heavy in the sponge-damp air and the droning

chanting

the chanting carries on not made deeper for the voices' placement in the temple itself. As she walks the jungle may as well be chanting to her. Cicada carapaces hung as amulets from the trunks of the trees their dead shells amethystine as if their wings are set to flap and take the bodies to flight like calling to like but Sera pockets that soaring sun-soaked bronze ring and it does nothing to stop the flapping.

When she looks back down from the sky in search of her spire this time the world yawns in front of her. Ripples as if she were looking into a still pool and a droplet of cohesion fell from behind her and landed there. As if she were about to walk through a membrane.

Serafíne

The rustling and something falls from the trees and our Sera, who has her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket and her arms out all akimbo and the world spinning tumbled-strange around her glances back, over her shoulder in time perhaps not to see the lemur proper but its coiled little ringtail as it disappears into the hungry-ghost's mouth.

"Hey - !" This startled little yelp. Lemurs are fucking adorable. Even the ones that the street performers had leashed and chained and trained (god knows how - try not to think about it) to do tricks for tips down by the beach in Phuket and she recognizes the tail at the least. She likes: fuzzy things, Sera. Breathes in or hunches up with delight and wonder when they come her way. Has an always-open, always-bleeding heart.

There's not a body to keen over, though. Just a no-face with a shriveled mouth and a distended stomach, the stark, spare frame of exigency, of want, of privation she knows so well, from the inside and from without.

"Did it help?"

Quietly, like she's waiting for an answer. This compressed sort of compassion threaded with iron through her voice.

honest gods

And the hungry ghost looks back at her. At least aims its blank-slate face at her. Its little mouth pursed such that she could read displeasure or wonder or bemusement in the wrinkles lining it if she had anything else to go on. Just this small portal through which it funnels fuel its body does not use.

It is not a body. It is a spirit. There is a reason it can make no use of the things it consumes. Maybe the things it consumes live on forever. Maybe they were never there to begin with.

The chanting continues.

Serafíne

She wants:

to give it something. Some thing. Some spark. Some sense of satiation; not the illusion of it but the promise, right? This-suffering-is-not-in-vain.

And that's not always true; in fact, it's usually false. Most suffering in the world is in vain; is singular and solitary, is alone, in the end. Bright and clear and whole as she wants the world they inhabit to be, she knows far better than most what lies beneath.

And she does not believe in

God

or even

gods. Just people.

Who are bound to disappoint you, every fucking time. Or not, you know? That's always the other option.

What the fuck does she know: about ghosts or spirits or transubstantiation (okay: Catholic girls' school, she knows something about transubstantiation) but she knows this thing, whatever it is, is hungry,

and guesses that it cannot get full.

--

Knows, too, that it brought her here. And that: here is where she wanted to be.

--

"I'm sorry." When she speaks, you see - magick. The little tricks she praticed earlier. In the market, on the train. Steal the sense of language from the ether and impregnating it into the synapses of her mind and the sinews of her tongue. Can't speak spirit, doesn't know precisely that this thing is a spirit but hey. It picked her up on a moped in the at the train station. Maybe it knows, remembers, is imbued with the language that was swimming in the air around them when she stumbled down from the platform. "I mean, that you're suffering. If you're suffering? And I guess there's just shit that's eternal, like always-was and always-will-be and then there's everything else then if you're eternal I'm probably not sorry and this is all ridiculous because fuck, that is some powerful shit. Like I toy with it - sometimes - but fuck.

"But you know if you're not eternal.

"If this is a fucking transitional state " (something she knows: she feels, after all, like the moment between was and becoming) " - you can find your way through."

Pulls out the last three of the seeds she purchased at the nightmarket in Bangkok and holds them in the neat little funnel of her fingertips. Holds them for a second longer

(concentrating) then offers them to him.

If he takes them.

honest gods

Plenty of Thai folklore concerning crossroads and the spirits who haunt them. Seeds and the power of trees and new things. The deities responsible for the trees and new things. Ghosts for occasions such as sudden death and death in childbirth and death by hasty violence. Ghosts who were executed by burning and drift through the night heads intact but lungs and other viscera floating along behind them. Ghosts who eat entrails.

Plenty to learn when visiting other countries other cities even going out into the rural places of one's own home but Sera is not a folklorist. She was here to take a vacation. She doesn't know shit about ghosts.

As far as she knew this ghost was a guy an hour ago. Hours ago. Time has ceased to mean anything. Behind her the membrane between worlds has stopped its rippling dance and gone back to standing as still and permeable as if nothing were ever wrong with it at all.

The hungry ghost cants its head with the extension of her hand and the seeds nestled in the space between her fingers. Sight without eyes. Understanding without language. He cannot talk if he hasn't got a mouth. This isn't the guy she met at the railway station.

Maybe she would recognize the guy she met at the railway station if she saw him again. Maybe he was disguising himself as a living young man all this time. Maybe she's just tripping her ass off right now.

A few teetering steps graceful despite the tipping sharp nature of its form it's got to be nearing eight feet tall by now its belly distended further with the introduction of the lemur fur and all teetering towards Sera without a face to voice intent or attention and then he - it? - places its great spindly hands over the swell of its belly and bends at the knees eye-level with Sera for a moment without any eyes.

The chanting stops.

That needle-small mouth sucks up the seeds. A spasm-quick cant of its head. Inquisitive. That mouth is dry as a grave and it seeks Sera's fingers now that the seeds are gone.

Serafíne

"No."

Sharp.

Definite.

Definitive.

The drawing of a line.

She pulls back her fingers and her voice has (temporarily) this sort of cracking authority to it.

"I gave you what I wished to give. You don't get any more."

This brief, curtaining smile follows and then she turns. Knows where that membrane was. She made it herself, didn't she? Imagined it there, imagines it again. She knows where she's going now, and doesn't give a fuck about the road, or maybe she gives enough fucks about the road that it opens for her. That it unrolls beneath her and sends her tumbling straight to the base of the temple, isolated, marooned in the jungle.

Or maybe she just whips through the understory: runs, flat-out, open, absurd and fuck every goddamned obstacle. She'll fling herself over, under, through.

honest gods

[SUCH PAUSE]

honest gods

So the hungry ghost cants its head with the rebuke its blank face betraying neither understanding nor contrition and after it has drawn back from fingers that smell of smoke and dirt and filling things it now well over eight feet tall and thinner even than it was when Sera mistook it for a living young man turns its small mouth away its blank face away and with jerky coltish steps turns and adds a shadow to the congregation born of trees.

Cloud and canopy blot out the stars overhead. Hard to tell if the darkness comes from nightfall or an incoming storm.

When she passes through that membrane Sera feels no different. The sensation is akin to walking through a mist cool and fleeting but it does not cling to her skin as water would. Immediate dissipation.

As she walks through the jungle the chanting persists. The temple has been here for seven hundred years. All other things being equal it will still be here in seven hundred years. It and the chedi. The spire. The resting place of all the monks who have died in this place. Their bones entrusted to the earth that sustained them.

The lawn before the wat is empty but for her own shadow.

Serafíne

Sera makes a quiet huff when the hungry ghost steps from her rebuke. She glances back, through the inky shadows, to watch him go. Feels the strangest sort of pang but she always feels the strangest sorts of pangs, pangs that strangers never seem to feel. Doesn't mind them, though. Or turn from them, or refuse them. Does not seem to have learned the fundamental lesson that some people think our minds and our bodies want us to learn: that hurts. don't do it again.

A helluva lot of things worth doing hurt.

Sometimes over and over and over.

And you can stand a helluva lot more than you ever imagined you could.

--

But here, right, now.

No change. There and here. No change, on this side and the other. Barriers are illusions, too. Still, she steps through and feels it and then feels it gone against her skin and makes this little noise: pop, human imitation of a soap bubble popping, and keeps walking, pushing through the growth all around here, until she stands before the temple. Heads for the tunnels, first, not the spire Sometimes you have to descend before you have a hope of remembering how to climb.

honest gods

All limitations are self-imposed.

Life is suffering. Suffering is caused by craving and aversion. Suffering can be overcome and happiness can be attained. This is about as far as the paths that Buddhists and Cultists walk together. The Buddhist method of surpassing one's limits and the Cultist method are not the same. They both push themselves. But the Buddhist avoids excess. The Cultist seeks out Kamamarga.

The unwise Cultist will become dependent on her tools. She will lose her own path for never having found it in the first place. Drugs and sex and staying high all the time creates an energy that is no more constructive than a hurricane.

Sera has not found a path laid out for her here. She has been drinking and smoking and swallowing seeds for days. This tunnel is well-lit but the light is swimming as she barges out of the jungle and into its maw.

The female entity she kissed last time pushed her off a cliff. She exists on the boundary between states of being. Freedom and limitation. Gestation and rebirth. She has stood plenty more than plenty of people ever imagine possible but see: life is suffering.

No one has all the answers. She has to make her own answers.

The chanting could very well be coming from inside her head. She cannot get a lock on its origins. It is everywhere. It is the walls and the darkness.

Serafíne

Her senses are blown all-open. The smeary light beneath, the ancient carvings. There she is, this strange, drunk, sleep-deprived, hallucinating creature caught up in between the rhapsodic and the literal and the littoral. There are carvings on the wall or just the grooves from a thousand other hands, a thousand other strangers, a thousand other lives. She tips her head backwards against the curve of the tunnel, feels its elegant rise. No angles, just curves.

The stuffed face of the plush-panda-backpack catches on the grooves in the walls. She plants her hands on her thighs and then, back sort of braced against the wall, sinks and sinks and sinks until she is seated on the floor. Listening.

--

The last time she went seeking, she found the graves of her dead and scrubbed the faded stones. Couldn't see the names but:

she knows them now. Mourns them, sure. Sometimes joyfully, sometimes quietly, sometimes just heaving. Lives with the loss, the way everyone does. Wrote those stories back into her skin. On the floor of the tunnels beneath Wat Umong, Sera pulls her knees up to her chests and allows herself: to feel, all of that, again. Not just the pain, but also the joy. The love, the sorrow. The pain, the guilt. Pulls that into her body and pushes it right back through.

She allows it to shred her heart right down to its bloodiest, most rendered fibers.

She remains whole.

--

Easier than you ever imagined it could be to suffocate someone. Nose pinched shut, hand over the mouth, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry and

she still is. Though perhaps, not for the reasons anyone else could imagine.

--

This is what she gives. This is what she has. This is what she is. Her eyes closed, her throat raw, her nails digging into the meat of her palms. The shutter-snap points of crisis and resolve, the patchwork heart, the hurricane of love, and fear, loss and beauty. More than enough meat to feed a hundred hungry ghosts.

--

The temple doesn't matter. The road is wrong. The jungle, the boy, the train, the strangers, the night market. Except: they all do. Give her the space to pull herself open and wrap herself up again. The simple pleasure of strange food purchased from a stranger, nightnoise all around, the faint glow of firelight reflecting on rice paddies in the distance.

But: she doesn't need the temple, or the train, or the tunnels, or the jungle, or the nightmarket, and maybe she didn't actually need to leave the fucking room. Sometimes empties herself until she's shaking from need and sometimes she fills her every whim until it seems that the world will not, will never, could never stop its spinning and the night pulls thin like taffy and it seems that she will never approach something like sobriety every fucking again, and they're all just tools.

She has what she needs in her own hands, and her own heart.

--

The last time, She pushed her off a cliff.

This time, if needful, if necessary, if well-and-truly asked: Sera would jump.

Maybe she already has.

--

The chanting, everywhere and nowhere, does not stop. She doesn't understand a fucking word of it but the rhythm is there, the incessant drone, perfect counterpoint to the willful breaking and remaking of her fucking heart. Which she gives: as thoroughly and entirely as she gives anything, ever, as she tries to Make It Stop.

honest gods

The only way around is through.

The only way to Make It Stop is to Wait Until It Stops On Its Own.

--now boarding at gate--

Outside the temple the jungle teems and even inside the dry yet glistening walls of the tunnel the loam and the oxygen and the unseen crawling things creating a sense of held breath the chanting come to her as if out of the earth now Sera can feel the world watching her its breath held knives out waiting for her and the seeds she gave to the hungry ghost take root outside she cannot see it but she hears it feels the ground shake with it and when she looks down at the ground it is no longer sole-smoothed stone but black-and-white a checked pattern and the chanting

--ited flight eighteen-oh-two--

and the chanting goes on the chanting is a fingernail scratch over a scab quick flinch of a reminder and the walls glisten not with dew not with sublimated oxygen but with something darker something reeking of iron and the checked pattern yawns out in front of her as the walls of the tunnel pull back breaking-bone slow darkness coming in around her and she knows this darkness she knows it will end.

Darkness of the world or darkness of her closed eyes. Something whispers behind her. An accusation. A threat. It doesn't sound human. If she turns she turns towards more darkness. When she turns the voice stays behind her. If she squints into the darkness she can see shapes loping about in it. Ten-feet-tall shapes. Shapes like men. Gray skin and needle-mouths stringy hair and swollen gravity-stretched bellies this is a place of hungry ghosts none of them her hungry ghost and they are aware of her but she has nothing they want and they are not the ones whispering to her. They are not the ones who died because of her. They only feed on the things she offers them.

It does not feel as if it will end.

It does not feel as if it will end.

--onstop service from los angeles to den--

Eventually she has to open her eyes. Reality is waiting for her. Reality and an uncomfortable chair in a fluorescent-lit airport terminal and the worst migraine she's had in recent memory.

Everything she had with her on the motorbike is here with her now but nothing works. Not her cellphone not her lighter not her compact mirror. The payphone will not take her debit card or the change she offers it. Airport personnel and other passengers seem unaware of her presence. No one she speaks to reacts as if they hear or see her.

Dried saliva stains her fingertips.

Sera

She has had a lot of bad fucking migraines in recent memory.

Curls there in the hard plastic embrace of the chair as long as she can stand the assault of both nausea and pain, eyes closed, fingers pinching the bridge of her nose.

Then: lurches upright. Stumbles toward the nearest bathroom to try to throw up. Nothing comes.

--

Her face is stark and hollow and mirrors are strange, strange things. Her own eyes looking back at her, stark and wide. The bright-wet line of a stray drop of tap water on her cheek. She manages one of those sink-baths that happen in airport restrooms after overseas flights, cups her hand beneath the faucet, drinks and then wants to puke again. Doesn't.

Wants to cry, too.

Doesn't.

--

And it's not like she figures out the phone, the debit card, the machinery of ordinary life, the people: do not see and will not acknowledge her presence on the plane of this earth right away or even quickly, because: she washes her face, her mouth, her armpits, the back of her neck because she doesn't want any of that. Not people, not strangers, not the next flight home, not a goddamned sausage biscuit. Not any of it.

Goes outside, sits back down in those hard, injection-molded chairs. She's so damned conscious of her own failure, it feels like her sternum is caving in.

She doesn't move, for a long, long time.

H O R S

Kiara Woolfe

[Yay, people! I'm going to go type something.]

Kiara Woolfe

Fall was settling comfortably into Denver.

The trees beginning to shake off their leaves and leaving drying shells scattered over footpaths and manicured lawns the city over; the mountains turning brilliant shades of honey-gold and deep crimson red on the horizon and the weather starting to subtly shift; breezes bearing the intention of cooler days to come. Thursday afternoon in the city limits had dwindled into a pleasant, breezy affair. It was still warm enough for layers to be disguarded under the warmth of the sun, clouds scattering across its path.

Still the weather for lounging on the grassy expanses Washington Park had to offer; littered as they were of recent days with curling, crumbling leaves. You still found the poets with their heads buried in books, stretched out on the ground with their shoes beside them; feet bare to the world. Still the mothers pushing strollers along the winding pathways, dogs chasing balls and the glinting promise of the lake, birds diving and settling on its surface to glide along, shaking their feathers and dipping their faces into the water.

The face of a city that changed and within it - the ones who saw the other side. The shadows that fell, the noises and the ugly.

Kiara Woolfe wasn't to be found lounging on the grass as late afternoon sunlight slanted across it, she was on one of the park's many basketball courts, seated on the side beside a chainlink fence, tying her dark hair back, a basketball housed between her feet. She was the sole occupant of the court aside from a lone bird; perched high on the fence, watching her progress with tiny, anticipatory movements of its head. When she rose, scooping up the ball, it startled and took flight with a rustle of feathers.

Kiara moved out onto the court, the sound of the ball echoing as she began a slow circuit.

Alexander

[Awareness?]

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

Grace

[Awareness?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 7, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Grace

This place, man. This fucking place.

Last time Grace was here it was to inspect the remains of a woman-chimera with four arms who'd put a good friend into... let's say mental distress. Almost getting your face ripped off will do that to you.

Then, there was everything that happened after.

She doesn't even really know why she's here, other than perhaps something in her that wants to show the monsters who's boss. Don't show your face here anymore, right? We live here too, and we like this park.

Well, territorial, tribal ideology never sit well with Grace. She'll make an exception for dead things who like to reshape people into horrified and horrifying monsters. Call it the line beyond which Grace Evans will actually categorize a person.

Anyway, it's with that thought in mind that she's in the park today, dressed in her jeans and bite-proof grey turtleneck jacket, paying a great deal of attention to what's going on around her (while simultaneously shoving her head in her cell phone and walking). She hears the basketball. She feels the pulse of the world. She looks up, and starts toward the court.

Kiara Woolfe

[Awareness, perhaps?]

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

Kiara Woolfe

[All of time and space is the Verbena's.]

Alexander

[Because I need to know if he fluffs or not for the post... Arete: Spirit 1, Entropy 1. Sensing the gauntlet, looking for weakness. Coincidental, TN4. +1 for trying something new, -1 for taking his time.]

Dice: 1 d10 TN4 (9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Kiara Woolfe

[Playin' some ball. Dex + Ath.]

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

Alexander

Kiara may not have been drawn here to lounge on the grass, but Alexander? Well, that’s exactly where he can be found. Not so far away, at a familiar spot near the lake, he’s lying on the grass. It’s not particularly uncommon to find him here, although his visits maybe aren’t quite as frequent as they used to be. There’s still hope in the visits, though. Hope that he’ll meet someone again, hopefully in better circumstances. Until he learns how to do more than look into the spirit world, this is the best chance he has for that meeting.

He seems to be watching the lake, but that isn’t really where his attention is at the moment. The bottle of water that he’s slowly turning over and over in his hand might, to those who know him and how he Works, give the hint that his attention is elsewhere. There’s also a frigid, frozen chill in the air around him as his will bends reality just a little. Not enough to do anything obvious to those who aren’t attuned to such things. Just enough to deepen his awareness of the border of this world and its mirror. Scratching at the boundaries, looking for areas of strength and weakness.

He’s there for a while before other sensations start to make their selves known. The pulse of the world not so far away. The razor edge of fluttering wings. The gathering of Awakened. Letting go of the effect, he pushes up from the grass and heads towards the basketball court to meet the familiar – and not as familiar – presences.

Dan

Tall guy in black skinny jeans, a fitted flannel shirt open over a t-shirt. Blond hair, blond beard, hints of tattooes flashing at cuffs and collar like the evidence of ink on a scrivener's hand. He has a battered leather bag slung across his tall, spare frame and is walking with a long-haired brunette in a flowing, flowered skirt that billows in the wind. She, in turn, is walking this bright yellow-and-orange fixed gear bicycle along the path. Has a basket on the front and paperflowers woven into the weave.

He's smoking a cigarette. Well, maybe it's a cigarette, except she asks for a drag and he gives it to her while they stand at a cross-roads, looking not-at-all like park-people. He catches a glimpse of Grace or maybe of Kiara, though. Takes back the cigarette and touches the brunette's shoulder and says something low by way of farewell. She climbs on the bicycle, nevermind the way her skirt blows in the high plains wind, and keeps on going. He turns and lifts a hand toward - well, someone. Maybe a couple of someones. Maybe whoever will return it.

"Grace," Dan says, overtaking her with his long strides and lanky frame. Then, "Kiara," when they reach the basketball court. Listens to that peculiar ring of the ball against the court - elastic and resonant, all at once. Taut.
"Fancy a game of HORSE?"
Wry grin at Grace. Maybe a challenge.

River Vasquez

River doesn't know anyone here except Farrah. They haven't been to the park together but they have gone and gotten a new wardrobe. She's got a couple job applications tucked into her oversized purse and there she is, walking around the park with a pair of awfully high heels thrown into her purse so she can walk around and enjoy the feeling of the ground on her feet. It was starting to get cold, too. Or, at least, colder than the perpetually perfect San Diego.

Her hips swayed when she walked, exaggerated and like she was bopping along to some song that was playing in her head. The strut said it all: River was bouncing along to the Beegees Stayin' Alive. She doesn't really care where she's walking, just that she is walking and then this: she notices the sound of people on the basketball courts. She doesn't know who they are, but she is curious enough that she wouldn't mind seeing what tthey were doing.

A heel turn and redirection later, the dark-haired woman bops down the way to see people. She's got on yoga pants. Yoga pants and an oversized shirt and a sports bra that is more restrictive than a sportsbra has any right to be. No sir, nothing on River Vasquez was moving unless she damned well wanted it to.

And thus, the ball of sunshine bops over to the basketball courts.

Grace

"Neiiigh?" Grace says, flashes Dan a smile. "Oh, wait. That sounds like no. I mean, yes. Unless that means you want me to ride you, in which case -- no."

She quirks her head, though not at anything in particular. Maybe analyzing her own speech for its utter strangeness. "How do you play horse? Also, hi Kiara."

Hi, sunshine. Well, that's different. Grace turns away from the court, looks the new one up and down. There, a little tick of the head upwards, like 'hey'.

Kiara Woolfe

The brunette navigates the court at a slow jog, bouncing the ball between her hands. She's a lean creature, the Verbena, with finely shaped features and dark, expressive eyes. She feels a little like a fixed pulse to the world and a lot more like the first flush of exhilaration. Nature in perpetual motion, that's the sense Kiara Woolfe gives as she lobs the ball toward the ring and watches the neat arc it cuts through the air, watches it hit the ring and wobble inside.

There's a flash of teeth at that, a private (or so she believes in the moment) surge of satisfaction.

She's dressed as much for the occasion as the weather, the pagan, in a pair of soft grey sweatpants that are tied loosely at her hips; in a fitted shirt that adheres to the curve of her spine; her middrift is bear where it cuts off and the dark lines of a tattoo are visible, teased at the edges where the hem rises as she reclaims her ball and turns to sight the sensations creeping along her skin.

The bite of Alexander, the shifting, keen sensation of Grace. Others, too. Some Kiara can't instantly place, that has her pause. Raises a hand to cover her eyes and look across the rolling slope of a hill, beyond the fence and the dappling surface of the water. The ball is tucked under an arm and she's still in transit as Dan appears, as they're greeting her.

"Hey Grace, Dan." There's a flush of color in the Verbena's cheeks, it suits her alarmingly well. "Do something fancy, shoot for the hoop. Next in line has to copy you or create their own." She raises her eyebrows in Dan's direction, gently directs her ball his way with a dragging edge of a smile.

"You can lead us off if you want. Show us what you've got."

Dan

"I'm not one to insist on universalizing my own experiences," says Dan, and maybe he's smirking a bit behind the shadow of his beard, while also rather precisely pinching off the cherry of his cigarette(?) and then stomping the ember to ash beneath the heel of his Converse All-Stars. He's wearing them for fashion, not function. That smirk mingles with a vague, bemused grin. " - but, you've never played HORSE?"

A lift of his chin, wordlessly returning Kiara's greeting. Falls silent as she explains then game, then reaches out to take the basketball as Kiara passes it his way.

Those are musician's hands, not a ball handler's, but still. Can't be a lanky guy from middle-America without playing some basketball, someday, somewhere.

"You do a 'round, repeat the last shot. If you make it, great. If you miss it, you get a letter. Once you've spelled HORSE, you're out. Last person standing wins."

He takes a minute to lift his leather bag over his body and set it carefully aside, then gives the basketball a few experimental dribbles, hand-to-hand before shaping a drive toward the basket.

First shot is simple: a lay-up.

Dan

Dan retrieves the ball as it comes through the basket and passes it to Grace.

Dan

(Lay-ups are easy, dif 4 if you guys wanna roll!)

Alexander

Alexander wanders over with no great rush. There doesn’t seem to be any great disaster at this exact moment, nothing that needs to be rushed towards or away from. And let’s be honest here, he is more likely to be rushing towards it – partly in case anyone else is in danger, partly because he’d just want to know what was happening. Apparently he thinks the cat just got unlucky.

Yes, Alexander heads towards the court. He’s not dressed particularly differently from the others this afternoon. He wasn’t unfamiliar with colder climes, so the trousers favoured by the others are replaced by cargo shorts. The guy seems to like his pockets. Above that, a black sleeveless tshirt covered by a red flannel shirt, worn open and untucked and drifting vaguely in the breeze. Some walking boots and a rucksack, now shouldered, completed his attire for the moment. It wouldn’t be entirely surprising to find him with something tucked away for if the weather changes for the worse, though. He’s lived here long enough.

He pauses at the gate to the court to watch what’s happening, and to wait to be noticed. As if they wouldn’t have picked up on his approach any more than he picked up on their presence here. But he doesn’t want to distract anybody from their shot.

Kiara Woolfe

[I just like rolling to see how badly the dice roller crushes my dreams. Hup, hup. Lay up.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (1, 3, 4, 4, 5, 10) ( success x 4 )

River Vasquez

[awareness: are these *gasp* unique people?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 3 )

River Vasquez

She is bright, a literal brightness that comes with warmth, that comes with the first rays of the sun that come back and fight their way through the vestiges of winter. There's a sort of determination that comes with those first sprouts of life that poke through the snow, something that is intent on becoming more than just grass.

But the other woman acknowledges her, the one who doesn't quite ping on River's senses as well as one would imagine, but we digress. She runs her hands over the rail, looks back when she feels the pull of something frozen on her senses. She turns around, regards the other stranger in a sea of them. She smiles, something bright and relaxed.

"The game just started," she said in a voice that has a fair bit of an accent. More Cuba than United States, but very familiar with English.

Grace

Ooh. Game. Some sort of sportsball game. Right. Horse.

Grace bounces the ball on the court, eyes flitting to the cold spire of Alex, and she smiles at him. Then, it's time to earn her letter. Or not. Who knows, she might just do the thing right.

She walks up to the spot where Dan shot from, and peers up at the hoop.

"Well, I didn't spend a lot of time outside when I was a kid. Jumping chollas and oppressive heat will do that to you," Grace says, and she doesn't follow that up with 'oh yeah, and none of the other kids would play with me', but there is that too. She has people to play with now, so. What does it matter?

[Dex + Ath = copying Dan's layup!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN4 (1, 1, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace

Not bad, nope. Went through the hoop at least. Grace assumes that counts, and picks up the ball to throw it to Kiara.

Kiara Woolfe

There are days when Kiara feels acutely connected to the world around her. Feels the way every tiny hair on her body reacts to stimuli: the sun, the gentle, curling breeze, the brush of fingers, the rough give of her basketball. The awareness of others, like her, who were at once a part of and more to all of it. She feels it today, beneath the afternoon light. The prickle of her senses - a hand raising to cup the back of her neck and she twists in a slight, fluid motion to watch Alexander's approach.

The edge of her mouth retains that same smile she'd offered Dan not a few heartbeats ago.

"Hey," she's studying Alexander now, her dark eyes absorbing a hundred tiny details about the man she knew by sight, by sense, but barely at all. The frozen lake in winter. She gestures at his rucksack, resting over a shoulder. "Unburden yourself and come join the game. I'm ambitious enough to want to see how I rank against everyone, today." Her smile widens and a dimple flashes into a cheek. "It's the day for it."

Then, warmth. Inviting and bone deep.

She turns to River, inclines her head. Her hand falling away. "It has," agreement, consideration. "You're welcome to join too, if you want." This briefest tick of eyes over her figure and she turns back in time to catch the ball lobbed her way by Grace. She moves across to take up the other woman's place, canting a little smile sidelong as she does. "Not bad, Evans."

Then, her face adopts a slightly more focused expression, eyes on the hoop, her entire body sings with it. The anticipation of landing the shot. When she makes it, her shirt lifts enough to reveal the full design of that tattoo on her lower back, a spiraling shape with a line cut through it. It gives the impression of something vaguely oriental, some designation or belief inked into the pagan's skin.

Her shot sinks into the hoop neatly and Kiara makes a tiny hop-step of satisfaction.

Dan

They're all Special People, resonant, the signature of their magic charging the air around them so distinctly and assuredly. All Special except for the guy with the roughly worked head of blond hair and the wallet chain and on and on and on. Him? He's ordinary.

Gives Grace an ordinary little grin/smirk in response to her ellipses of understanding. Then gives her a few beats of applause when she makes the lay-up. Watches the ball as she passes it to Kiara then his eyes cut back to Grace as she walks or maybe-jogs across the court and out of Kiara's way. Drops his mouth to Grace's ear and mutters something.

(Muttered: "It's all physics, Grace.")

Which he knows would never make sense to Sera, who does not believe in physics. He figures Grace does, though.

"Game just started," the guy affirms to River, either in echo of overlay of Kiara's statement. "No one has an H yet." Is: retrieving the ball from beneath the basket or maybe wherever it rolled after that shot - bending low and scooping it up with long-fingered and rather deft hands, tossing it back and forth like he's deciding whether or where to go when his phone rings.

Or rather: his phone starts playing the opening riff to The Breeders' Cannonball.

Which means: his phone rings.

He has the presence of mind to toss the ball in Alexander's direction (hey! join the game!) even as he's reaching for the phone in his back pocket. Pulling it out, putting it to his ear. Maybe he gives them a gotta get this but isn't that obvious?

"Hey. Where the fuck are you?" He might be overheard saying as he walks off, pausing only long enough to grab the bag he dropped off when he stepped onto the court.