Somewhere north of four p.m. and south of midnight, maybe even south of five p.m. because even with the low clouds clotting the strangely warm December sky there is something of the gloaming haunting the seams of the city. That moment when the sky is brighter than the streets below, which are wrapped in the edged shadows that accompany sunset. So: right.
That sort of hour that can make your teeth ache from beauty except on nights like this one, so wrapped in clouds that the boundary between day and dark becomes occluded and that is the hour when our heroine awakes, all alone in her great big bed, wrapped up in her white duvet and white linens. Whomsoever she brought with her last night slipped out hours before. Most people have schedules, expectations, appointments, work of some sort in order to keep the rent paid. She seems to have slipped through every single one of those traps of modern life: stays up all night, sleeps the day away. Wakes up luxuriously hung over and feels the throbbing of her head, and decides over her morning tea whether she wants to nurse the hangover away, or just Will it gone.
--
Dee is feeding Sid and contemplating the contents of the fridge and watching the Thailand episode of Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown on the little TV they keep on the top shelf of the baker's rack in the breakfast nook when Sera comes padding down the stairs in a t-shirt and boxers with a plus velvet blanket wrapped around her shoulders, scrubbing the sleep from her eyes, and to be fair it is late even for her to be getting up, but Dee says nothing. Glances up from where she's been eyeing the contents of the fridge, trying to throw together some inspiration for dinner and tells Sera that Dan's still in that meeting, does she want some tea?
And yes: Sera does want some tea, and Sid - who had been sleeping kind of wedged beneath the living room couch and was not excited about getting fed because thus far it had not involved the can opener - comes padding into the kitchen to say hi too with a butt of her head against the back of Sera's thighs. Which makes Sera smile a sleepy smile and inhale and drop a hand to the crown of the dogs head and give her a scritch and yes, tea please! Did we already say that?
So: Cultist and Ecstatic sitting cross-legged on the kitchen island, with her pot of tea and her cup and saucer (delicately patterned with english roses, thank-you) and her flask of whiskey to dose it to her liking and her friend and sometimes-lover and also bassist and almost-nearly-consor leaning back against the opposite counter, both watching as Anthony Bourdain drinks a soup made of raw blood pounded with fresh lemongrass into a pink froth and drinks Chinese liquor that, he claims, smells like dirty socks.
Dee wants to know if she tried that and Sera clarifies, tried what? and Dee means, both, and no, Dee, "I did not drink fucking blood." Sera tips a thimbleful of tea into her teacup, but oh, it is not yet steeped. "I drank alot of questionable booze, though. So the rest of it is a maybe." Wry. "After Dan left for home I took this train up to Chaing Mai, too. Wanted to go to Wat Umong, and maybe I fucking did, but maybe I was just hallucinating the whole fucking time. I bought these seeds in the night market, you know?"
To the thimblefull of weak tea Sera adds a shot of whiskey. That should start warming her blood and chase away some of the cobwebs from the night before.
Dee's eyes are soft. "Dan was worried about you."
Sera looks at her friend over the edge of the teacup and tosses back the shot. "I know." Clear-eyed and just as soft: respectful of his worry, perhaps even appreciative, but without regret or apology.
"Where you there the whole time?"
"What, you mean following some fucking yogi and fake-chanting in a language I don't fucking know?"
"Doing whatever. That or working on your tan or whatever the hell - " - beneath the concern, Dee's - well, there. She feels it. Allows herself to feel it - a little bit angry. The album they've been working on, they're supposed to be working on, the we'll make a go of it seems as far away as ever. Farther, somehow.
"No." An incision, an intercession, all in one-word. Spare enough that Dee is arrested and glances up at her friend, direct and uncompromising. "I wasn't." Somehow in the moment, that's enough. Dee doesn't need to ask anything more.
time's passageLife is ironic sometimes. Maybe if Sera was one of the Chakravanti, she'd call it fate: that tv show. Thailand. Blood and lemongrass. Maybe she'd think it was a sign. And maybe it is. Or maybe it's just convenient timing. Coincidence.
Time works its way around in circles sometimes. Especially for her.
Dee wants to know what the hell she got up to in Thailand: a literal question with an existential answer. It doesn't matter though. Sera leaves that part out. Because Dee may be almost a Consor but sometimes almost may as well be as far away as the fucking moon. Or maybe Sera just doesn't want to talk about it.
Somewhere nearby, Sid gives this little whine. She's looking at Sera with cocked ears and these quietly alert eyes. Like she smells something or hears something that she assumes Sera can also hear or smell. Like she's asking: should I be worried?
To which Sera may not have an answer. But when she lifts her teacup to her lips it smells like the ocean.
And there's a moment where the wind outside gusts against the frame of the house and the wooden supports give this low, muted creak.
It isn't so much a demand as a question. Like the whine in Sid's voice.
SerafíneYeah, Sera isn't one of the Chakravanti and she doesn't call it fate because fate has always seemed like such bullshit to her. Fate's what they say when they condemn you, too, for some past-and-future crime. Fate says: here is the groove the universe has made for you, this is how things go. Makes her think of this picture of a road she ones saw, something historical and all clotted up with Spanish moss and great old hanging oaks, the road so ancient it had been worn down over centuries between two hummocks of land. This little canyon: okay, go here. Nowhere else.
So: fuck fate.
Still, Sid whines. Sera straightens through the spine and glances down at the dogs, makes a comforting, clucking noise. Tongue against the roof of her mouth.
Then she gets that scent. Should be whiskey-scented, the last dregs of the shot she pulled, or the sweet floral delicacy of her favorite tea set abloom in not-quite-boiling water. The ocean.
She looks up, alert then. Somehow the hangover seems both propitious and meaningless but she doesn't really mind the vague cottony sensation in the back of her throat and behind her eyes and she breathes in and pours herself another spot of tea and doses it with whiskey and smiles at Dee - god she loves Dee - watches as Dee turns back to the fridge and bends over and pulls out the carton of eggs and asks if Sera wants an omelet and no, Sera does not want an omelet. But she watches Dee make one for herself with a gaze both rapt and steady, aching and hungry all at once. Uncurls her legs and slides off the counter and comes up behind Dee and presses her face to the center of the other young woman's spine. Plants a kiss there through the cotton hoodie she's wearing.
--
When she goes out later that night, it's almost like she's hunting.
time's passageSera doesn't want an omelet. It's late and she's hungover and the only thing in her stomach is tea and whiskey, but that's all part of the ritual, isn't it? The so-human aches of her body. The raw edge of hunger. Sid isn't sure what to make of it, but Sera - she isn't afraid of the wind. Or the ocean.
She kisses Dee's back, and Dee's hoodie does not smell like the ocean. It smells like Dee.
Love makes leaving both harder and easier.
It's dark by the time Sera leaves the house. And in winter, that could mean any time between barely-dinner and some time after most people have woken up for work, but tonight it's likely some time around late evening - not that it matters, really. The point is, the sky has gone from gloaming-bright to dim to dark in a relatively short span of time and when Sera makes her way out the door she's greeted by stars and city lights. There's a flirtatious quality to the wind - the way it picks up and sends her hair stirring wild around her face only to fall back again.
Like it's asking: are you sure?
Does she take her car? Or is she walking? One could argue that hunting is better done on foot, but then, this isn't any ordinary kind of hunting and Sera didn't equip herself with a bow and compass. And maybe it doesn't matter where she goes, because
-wherever you go, there you are.
The thing she's hunting for isn't something she's going to find on the street. But the hunting, the physical part of it, that's just a metaphor. The point is the drive. The point is the doing.
There's a lot of activity on the streets tonight. Cars driving to and from their destinations, packing together at slow streetlights while the drivers' wait impatiently for their turn to hit the gas. Maybe that's a metaphor too. There's a group of six 20-somethings, mostly men - two women, arguing at the corner of the sidewalk. Their debate is animated. Arms gesture broadly and voices rise in an echo over the hum and rumble of car engines. They're talking about gun control. The recent shooting in Colorado Springs.
As Sera approaches them, the wind picks up again. This time, the gust of it feels almost violent, battering against the cars and the pedestrians with a low, hungry howl. It rips a mostly-empty paper coffee cup out of one of the 20-something's hands and sends it skittering and rolling into the street. The owner of said coffee cup, a man with dark brown curls and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, throws his arms up in frustration...
...and holds them there. Suspended.
That's when everything in the world just stops. The wind. The coffee cup. The arguing voices. The cars. The landscape goes all freeze-frame, like the clocks suddenly ran out of time. Frozen. Silent.
Nobody moves. Nobody except Sera. Who is still: hunting.
And somewhere in the distance she can hear another voice. A familiar voice. A woman's voice. And the voice says, in this low, resonant echo:
Looking for something, querida?
SerafíneIt doesn't matter because it is a metaphor but this is how she goes hunting: on foot. Serafíne does not drive except in the most extraordinarily exigent circumstances It's just bloody irresponsible. She spends too much of her life deliberately hanging over the edge of some goddamned precipice, fucked up - somehow - always - and driving when you live a life like that is beyond reckless, it is unconscienable. There are other people outside that several-ton disaster seeking missile.
So: out into the night, the bright stars and the sharper lights and the cold that wraps her right around along with that playful bit of wind that feels like it was meant for her, and of course she is showing a helluva lot of skin. This designer dress with a see-through bodice in transparent black mesh patterned with polka dots and a somewhat more opaque skirt, pleated, which was meant to hit just above the knee but which Sera with Dee's help modified by cutting much of the length off with these jaggedly patterned pinking shears. Thigh-high tights with skulls up the back of her legs where the seam would've been back when nylons required seams and curb stompers. Nothing on beneath that transparent bodice to give it even a modicum of modesty but the leather jacket, you know, on top. Because it is cold.
Or maybe because she likes the goddamned thing.
And she has her hands in her pockets and another shot or two or maybe even three in her system and nothing like food and tonight she has eschewed getting stoned in favor of something else: a quarter, maybe a third of a tab of acid, melting beneath her tongue. Not enough to fuck her up, just enough to make the world swim all around.
Brightness in her eyes, this energy beneath her feet, a certain way her heart pouds (and oh how her heart pounds) as she walks - no, half-runs - through the old, familiar residential streets, feeling - as she is sometimes wont to do - that everything is bright, new, clean. That everything is always new and sharp and strange if only you're willing to open your eyes.
--
And then: fuck!
The world stops. It makes her giddier than she'd imagined she would ever be, that sensation of arrest which is brilliant, poised and wholly different from the other thing from which she has just been released: the sense of exile. She wants to run up to one of those six kids and kiss him. Wants to kiss all of them, maybe, wants to pluck the coffee cup up out of the street and put it back in his hand.
Then that voice: she turns doesn't she? A sharp spin in the motionless stillness, orienting on the sound.
"I'm looking for you."
Equal parts eager, hungry, and pissed the fuck off, she starts to run. Headlong, heedless, in whatever direction her senses tell her that voice is coming from.
The world stops still and it is... not so much static as liminal. It's a feeling Sera knows: that sense of being poised on a precipice, and she's been balancing here, one foot over the edge of some elusive boundary for so damn long. No wonder she's pissed off. No wonder she's running.
The voice is everywhere and nowhere and yet... she zeroes in on it. Starts running healong, heedless in those heavy boots and that tiny dress toward the center of the intersection, where there's nothing but a wide pot-hole filled with water. There's nothing there but she knows, right? Because she can smell sea-spray and electric current and there's a vibration like a tuning fork in her head ringing louder as she dashes out past the cars toward that pot-hole.
Then the voice is not everywhere-and-nowhere but right behind her. Not so hard to find me. Harder to follow.
Sera knows the woman by now. She knows her dark skin and the wild ropes of her hair; knows the glint of stars and lightning in her eyes. Knows the wind-kissed roughness of her hands and lips. And she appears no different tonight. There are copper bands around her arms and they seem to be humming (charged.)
They are, at that moment, standing beside the pool of water.
You still want to fly, querida?
She wanted that once. Tried to lift herself all the way into the sky. Couldn't quite do it then, see, so she jumped off a cliff instead.
SerafíneAnd then that voice is right behind her and she spines, bright and disordered, breathless now, and not laughing because there is something sharper and darker alive in her in just this moment. Between, god, she knows what the is, what it means - the edge of something - possibility, definition, promise, release.
"I want everything," The night is unmoving all around them. Sera remembers the shadow of the stars against the back of her eyes. "I want to fly, I want to drown. I want the breath from your goddamned lungs."
The scent of the ocean rising up from that puddle in that pot-hole. Jagged crater of asphalt all around, the oil-gleam of black water and something essential, elemental: salt-spray in the air.
Sera gives the woman a direct look: meets those star-and-lightning eyes and - jumps - right? From the pavement into the sea. Both feet, you know? All-at-once.
Maybe it is just what it appears to be: a puddle in a pothole in a frozen-but-not-empty street.
time's passageShe wants everything.
The woman laughs, at that. The sound of her voice echoes in this spinning, hungry way - like a twister, like a hurricane. Her voice is sharp but there is fondness there. There is pleasure as well as challenge.
We'll see, she says, just before Sera jumps into the water.
And this time (unlike the door) nothing stops her. The water is cold, and then it is colder and and colder and it swallows Sera like it's been starving for her, sucking her down into its depths. Everything is black and the water fills her lungs and it tastes like salt (like the ocean, like tears) and she can't breath and she can't see and all she can do is kick with her legs and thrash with her arms as the current drags her under.
It feels like she's dying.
Her heart beats like a hammer in her chest, fighting hard against the lack of oxygen. Her eyes sting. Her throat burns.
It takes too long. Maybe she actually is dying.
But then her center of gravity spins on its axis and instead of sinking she's rising, and her head breaches the surface of the water.
And suddenly she can breathe.
It isn't night anymore. She's floating in the ocean just off-shore of a place she's been before. Up ahead, there is a beach and then there is grass and a rising slope and old, weathered gravestones. In the distance there is a procession, only this time no one is wearing a mask. Further still, where the tangled old woods should be, there is instead a jungle - verdant green and humming with insects.
SerafíneThen she is beneath the water and all is dark and cold and her lungs are burning and there is this ancient ache in the center of her chest that opens and opens and opens until she cannot bear it anymore and she breathes in-in-in and there is no breath, no relief from strange claustrophobia with its concomitant euphoria that accompanies drowning: and she is not the strongest swimmer but if nothing else she has this will-to-live, desire-for-days, and she's drowning and she's breathing and she's scissor-kicking, struggling in darkness and god she has struggled in darkness before and then it changes and she spins, rising, rising, like the blood-tinged bubbles from a drowning man's lungs.
Pressure doesn't matter here, specific gravity, it is all a metaphor and anyway she doesn't believe in most of that shit, thank you very much, it's more that everyone else insists on it and she likes the words, sometimes, the ideas-of-things, the expansive way the confluence makes her feel.
So: here, rising. She breaks the surface with hoarse and hungry grasp. Shakes out her golden hair and orients herself. The stars, the movement, the shore: the impression of it. This moment of bobbing relief, of basking and then she kicks her legs and starts to move, swimming toward the shore, letting the waves lift her and pull her under, crashing with the curl as the weight of the wave spills over its crest and the something mysterious and unnameable pulls it all back out to sea.
And she crawls up on the shore,
And she is there, half in the water, half on the strand, rolling onto her back in not-gratitude, not-relief, but something else, that feels closer to catharsis, awe, worship. The rhythm of the oocean, the soundless darkness between the stars.
The need to move, the desire for it, a needle in her vein. And her: for a moment simply feeling it. Tattooing the memory into the dark folds of her brain.
--
She does move, of course. In the span of all-things, these moments are staccaher feetto little freeze-frames and soon enough she's knuckling herself upright, pushing herself to stand on the rocky (?) beach of the island. The procession she notes: of course. A glimpse at them winding their way through the hills. The jungle: new, strange and verdant.
First, though. The gravestones. Somehow it only seems right.
She marks their position, and starts to climb.
time's passageAt some point while she was drowning, Sera lost her shoes. There are holes in her stockings, gaping wide over the exposed flesh of her legs. Her jacket, too, is gone - but that's okay because it isn't cold here like it was in Denver. The beach is rocky, and the stones are sharp beneath her (essentially) bare feet. They cut and bruise as she makes her way up the slope, drawing blood from her soles. And as she climbs, she leaves red footprints in her wake.
It hurts. But Sera has hurt worse before, and there is a clarity to this pain that makes the world seem brighter. In the distance, the procession winds its way into the hills and disappears, their voices humming a low chant. By the time Sera reaches the graves, all she can hear of them is a distant echo.
The stones here are dotted with moss and lichen, sanded down from years of wind and rain. She's seen them before. Looking at them now, standing with her feet in the loose soil, there is a creeping sense of deja vu. Only this time: no mask. And written on each one of the graves:
Chastity Abigail Francesca Fuller
Is that what they always said? No. This is different. This is not groundhog's-day-repeating. As she looks at the graves, a gust of ocean wind hits Sera's back, sending a spray of fine sand scratching over her skin. It leaves little marks on her arms and shoulders - tiny cuts that bead up with pin-point drops of blood.
SerafíneWell, she might be pissed off if the jacket is gone-forever not because the cold matters all-that-much to her (the wind sharp against her skin; her jaw set, teeth chattering, body gone rigid against it; and then the hot blast of some interior, livid with humid humanity, the exhaled breath of a hundred not-precisely-strangers fogging the windows, that last, gasping seizure of a shiver as the body-in-shock from the cold shucks it off and melts into the environment. No: she doesn't precisely mind the cold. Likes it sometimes, the way it makes her want to move, to laugh or scurry or drag someone home with her.) but because she liked that jacket.
But hey: maybe it is something else she needs to shed.
And tomorrow there might be a new one she'll like quite as well. Better, even.
--
But here: coat and boots are gone and her nylons are torn to pieces and her feet and ragged, bleeding. The strand is dangerous here: lacerating. She does curse beneath her breath as she scrambles over the rocks but beyond those liberal, liberating, half-voiced fucks she doesn't cry out and doesn't quail. The pain is clarifying. She doesn't always shoot for clarity, does she, but somehow it also pushes her in a way that she pushes back against. This idea of resistance, of centripetal forces, of play, not give.
And her heart is pounding, as she scrambles up the hill toward the graves and she is trying to brace herself for what she believes she will see, the choking-fist sensation, the seizure of it that can come over her when she gives herself over to certain memories, but this is not déjà vu and the stones bear very different names and there is a kind of disconnect as she starts to read them and then -
- breathes out this bright-sharp sound, sharp little laugh that has the sense of pressure as if air were being released from the pinched valve of a balloon.
Once upon a time it hurt her to hear those names. Not hurt: made her shut down, shut up, go still, as if some dark and nameless Thing had come yawning up out of her past to consume her. Now though - after that brace-and-release - that noise dissolves into a short, barking little laugh and Sera lifts her head, looks up at the sky, back at the stones.
"Chastity," muttered, "Christ." It's the shittiest name, she thinks, you could ever give a child. "Thanks, Mom." Plants her bleeding foot on the edge of the closest grave marker, applies force, intending to upend, because, "She's not really dead you know? Part of me, the same as you."
Upend the one? Truth is: if one goes, she's gonna try for all of them.
time's passageIt is a shitty name. Shittier still for the weight it carries - the burden of someone else's mistake stitched into her like a legacy. Serafíne may not be the name on her birth certificate, but it is hers in a way that Chastity never was.
But Sera - she doesn't mourn. Because Chastity isn't dead (is not anymore a separate person than any other piece of herself.) Maybe once it'd felt that way - before Sera let herself remember. Now she sees those graves and she looks up at the sky and laughs.
Knows that it isn't true, see?
So she puts her foot on the first stone and pushes. It doesn't topple easily, but it does fall, ripping up a section of sparse grass and loose, sandy soil along with it. After that, she moves to the next grave. And the next. Upending the markers one by one as the wind stirs and lashes around her. It doesn't cut her again, but she can feel the crackling energy of it growing in the air. The shifting pressure like maybe a storm's about to hit - humid and salty and electric. It makes the hairs rise on her arms.
When she gets to the last grave, she watches the stone fall. Suddenly the wind stops and the air just... goes still. Even the churning tide on the beach goes silent. Then the earth just... collapses beneath her.
And she's falling in the dark, breathing in the scent of earth and loam and there's nothing to see or grab and time just kind of... stretches. Unspools into infinity and maybe she's going to spend the rest of eternity falling or maybe this is just one brief moment that feels like forever.
The smell changes. Not earth anymore. Clean - clinical. Antiseptic. Polished floors and industrial sheets and sterilizing alcohol. The light moves from dark to BRIGHT and when Sera opens her eyes she'll have trouble adjusting - will need to squint and blink before the room comes into focus.
She's in a hospital. Lying in a bed. Padded leather restraints are secured around her hands and feet. There's a doctor nearby - a man in his fifties with a salt-and-pepper beard looking at something on a clipboard - and a handful of nurses bustling back and forth in the nearby hallway. She isn't the only patient in the room. To her right, there's a little girl - maybe eight or nine - with dark hair and blue eyes who's curled up on her side in a second bed, watching Sera quietly.
SerafíneShe comes to in that place and (knows it before she opens her eyes, even as she is pulling back into herself the elastic sensation of forever / no time at all, the swallowed cry of surprise captured mostly in the cavity of her chest when the earth gave way beneath her feet and she knows it by the smell, knows it by the hum-of-the-place, machines somewhere, that sterile electricity, the lack of goddamned music or any natural sounds. They keep the windows not just closed but locked. Wouldn't want someone to jump, hmm?) braces herself, all physical, resists opening her eyes because she knows that she needs to pull it in, to hold it together and she starts to try to get up, but: fuck, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
She can't get up. She's restrained. Everything in her is prepared - is preparing for the place, the strange, urgent sterility of the space, but fuck -
- a sharp gasp, out-loud and her first instinct is to struggle, so goddamnit, she struggles yanking against the restraints, pushing herself breathless and forward, trying to rise.
time's passageThere's a digital monitor somewhere behind her, mapping out the rhythm of her heart. It spikes when she comes too - ticking up when she starts to struggle until a warning sound emits from the machine and a red light goes on.
Too fast. Her heart is pumping too fast.
The doctor doesn't even look at her until the machine starts to make that noise, somehow oddly quiet and anticlimactic when set against the torrential panic that wants to rise in Sera's chest. She wants to move - to get up, to get out - but she can't. She can struggle until she rubs the flesh from her wrists and ankles and those restraints will still hold.
It's cruel, the way the doctor watches her - the way he looks down with this impassive gaze and then just... makes a little note on his clipboard. He doesn't speak to her. Doesn't ask if she's alright. If she needs anything. He just walks to the door, opens it and leaves.
Leaves her there, tied to the bed and struggling. Alone, apart from the little girl.
The girl though - she opes her eyes wide in sympathy and huddles deeper into her pillow, clutching a ragged old white teddy bear to her chest like it's some kind of life preserver.
"Are you scared?" she asks softly.
Serafíne"Fucking asshole."
That's what she mutters beneath his breath. The glance, the moment of contact. Her body arches above the fulcrum at the center of her spine. Strained and restrained. The panic: she does not so much will it away as she allows it to wash through her and over her. Somewhere within she finds that this is a choice. Even now, her heart's pounding and she's alive in the middle of that sensation, focusing on it, within it - trying - panicked, irrational, bright - to find some way to transcend it and leash it to her will and make that asshole let her go, but: too little, too late.
He makes his note and leaves. He makes his note and leaves her here and some part of her thrashes against that, right? Howls.
The girl, though. A snap-glance. Tear-bright eyes but still somehow she is an anchor, not the weighted sort.
Is she scared?
"'Yes," a quick, strange-sharp smile, like a needle. Breathless. "I hate hospitals." Pause, grimace, correction, this brief, bitterbright laugh. "I have a phobia of hospitals."
"Are you scared?"
time's passageIt isn't just the physical restrains that tie her down. There's something about this place - this room - that feels too sterile. Like (antimagick.) When she tries to reach out with her Will it feels like pressing against gauze.
The doctor leaves, and Sera howls. Maybe it's just in her head or maybe she actually opens her mouth and releases that howl into the room. If she does, it doesn't echo the way it should because apparently everything in this place is fucking restrained, even sound.
At some point the machine stops giving off that alarm, but the red light stays on.
Despite her panic, Sera manages a few breathless words to the girl. Asks her if she's scared too, and the girl nods. After a moment, she lifts herself into a seated position, still clutching the bear to her chest. There's something familiar about her face but Sera can't quite place it.
"My dad used to sing to me when I got scared. Does your dad sing to you?"
SerafíneShitshit shit shit shit.
The sense of restraint (not simply limbs: but Will) makes her want to throw herself against it all: physically, bodily, metaphysically all at once. She feels that and thrashes once more. A hard, physical yank against the restraints. Twists within them, against them, still breatheless as the girl answers.
"No." Grimace, even through the edge of panick. "My dad's kind of a shit. I sing to myself, though.
"I can sing to you, too. If you want. And maybe you can help me, too.
"Undo one of these?" The question punctuated by an arc of her wrist.
time's passageShe gives another yank and the restraint pulls at her wrist. It isn't sharp like the rocks or the wind or the cold. It's padded, see?
For her safety.
Sera's dad is kind of a shit.
The girl glances at the restraints and gnaws on her lip. She ducks down and huddles her small body around the stuffed animal in her lap, hugging it to her chest like a life preserver. She looks... uncertain.
Finally she steals herself - takes this slow, deep breath and climbs down off the bed. Her hospital gown hangs open in the back. Underneath she has on grey pajamas with little crows stitched into the fabric. When she gets to the side of Sera's bed, she touches the restraint around Sera's wrist, tracing her fingers over it experimentally. She starts to work at the buckle, but the leather strap is thick and heavy and she has to tug hard to get it to budge. Even then, it's slow-as-fuck going, and the girl starts to cry a little out of frustration.
Serafíne"What's your name?"
--
Padded. For her safety.
Safety is the last thing she wants, the least of the things she needs.
--
Her heart is still pounding and her throat is raw and she watches the girl from this slanting perspective, tied down, restrained, the corners of her eyes. Bright twinge of something, not precisely compassion but tied to it, some spasm of fellow-feeling for the gape in the back of the girl's hospital gown. The stutterstep of uncertainty, stealing herself, then movement.
The edge of a breath shunted out as the girl cries out in frustration and that breath is a worned wrapped around a note, shading its way into a song. Wordless right now because she hasn't found her way to the words that might belong to the girl, soothing right now. But also: rallying. "You can do it - " ragged yeah, the break in melody before it resumes. "Patience isn't my strong suit, either."
SerafíneWell, she might be pissed off if the jacket is gone-forever not because the cold matters all-that-much to her (the wind sharp against her skin; her jaw set, teeth chattering, body gone rigid against it; and then the hot blast of some interior, livid with humid humanity, the exhaled breath of a hundred not-precisely-strangers fogging the windows, that last, gasping seizure of a shiver as the body-in-shock from the cold shucks it off and melts into the environment. No: she doesn't precisely mind the cold. Likes it sometimes, the way it makes her want to move, to laugh or scurry or drag someone home with her.) but because she liked that jacket.
But hey: maybe it is something else she needs to shed.
And tomorrow there might be a new one she'll like quite as well. Better, even.
--
But here: coat and boots are gone and her nylons are torn to pieces and her feet and ragged, bleeding. The strand is dangerous here: lacerating. She does curse beneath her breath as she scrambles over the rocks but beyond those liberal, liberating, half-voiced fucks she doesn't cry out and doesn't quail. The pain is clarifying. She doesn't always shoot for clarity, does she, but somehow it also pushes her in a way that she pushes back against. This idea of resistance, of centripetal forces, of play, not give.
And her heart is pounding, as she scrambles up the hill toward the graves and she is trying to brace herself for what she believes she will see, the choking-fist sensation, the seizure of it that can come over her when she gives herself over to certain memories, but this is not déjà vu and the stones bear very different names and there is a kind of disconnect as she starts to read them and then -
- breathes out this bright-sharp sound, sharp little laugh that has the sense of pressure as if air were being released from the pinched valve of a balloon.
Once upon a time it hurt her to hear those names. Not hurt: made her shut down, shut up, go still, as if some dark and nameless Thing had come yawning up out of her past to consume her. Now though - after that brace-and-release - that noise dissolves into a short, barking little laugh and Sera lifts her head, looks up at the sky, back at the stones.
"Chastity," muttered, "Christ." It's the shittiest name, she thinks, you could ever give a child. "Thanks, Mom." Plants her bleeding foot on the edge of the closest grave marker, applies force, intending to upend, because, "She's not really dead you know? Part of me, the same as you."
Upend the one? Truth is: if one goes, she's gonna try for all of them.
time's passageIt is a shitty name. Shittier still for the weight it carries - the burden of someone else's mistake stitched into her like a legacy. Serafíne may not be the name on her birth certificate, but it is hers in a way that Chastity never was.
But Sera - she doesn't mourn. Because Chastity isn't dead (is not anymore a separate person than any other piece of herself.) Maybe once it'd felt that way - before Sera let herself remember. Now she sees those graves and she looks up at the sky and laughs.
Knows that it isn't true, see?
So she puts her foot on the first stone and pushes. It doesn't topple easily, but it does fall, ripping up a section of sparse grass and loose, sandy soil along with it. After that, she moves to the next grave. And the next. Upending the markers one by one as the wind stirs and lashes around her. It doesn't cut her again, but she can feel the crackling energy of it growing in the air. The shifting pressure like maybe a storm's about to hit - humid and salty and electric. It makes the hairs rise on her arms.
When she gets to the last grave, she watches the stone fall. Suddenly the wind stops and the air just... goes still. Even the churning tide on the beach goes silent. Then the earth just... collapses beneath her.
And she's falling in the dark, breathing in the scent of earth and loam and there's nothing to see or grab and time just kind of... stretches. Unspools into infinity and maybe she's going to spend the rest of eternity falling or maybe this is just one brief moment that feels like forever.
The smell changes. Not earth anymore. Clean - clinical. Antiseptic. Polished floors and industrial sheets and sterilizing alcohol. The light moves from dark to BRIGHT and when Sera opens her eyes she'll have trouble adjusting - will need to squint and blink before the room comes into focus.
She's in a hospital. Lying in a bed. Padded leather restraints are secured around her hands and feet. There's a doctor nearby - a man in his fifties with a salt-and-pepper beard looking at something on a clipboard - and a handful of nurses bustling back and forth in the nearby hallway. She isn't the only patient in the room. To her right, there's a little girl - maybe eight or nine - with dark hair and blue eyes who's curled up on her side in a second bed, watching Sera quietly.
SerafíneShe comes to in that place and (knows it before she opens her eyes, even as she is pulling back into herself the elastic sensation of forever / no time at all, the swallowed cry of surprise captured mostly in the cavity of her chest when the earth gave way beneath her feet and she knows it by the smell, knows it by the hum-of-the-place, machines somewhere, that sterile electricity, the lack of goddamned music or any natural sounds. They keep the windows not just closed but locked. Wouldn't want someone to jump, hmm?) braces herself, all physical, resists opening her eyes because she knows that she needs to pull it in, to hold it together and she starts to try to get up, but: fuck, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
She can't get up. She's restrained. Everything in her is prepared - is preparing for the place, the strange, urgent sterility of the space, but fuck -
- a sharp gasp, out-loud and her first instinct is to struggle, so goddamnit, she struggles yanking against the restraints, pushing herself breathless and forward, trying to rise.
time's passageThere's a digital monitor somewhere behind her, mapping out the rhythm of her heart. It spikes when she comes too - ticking up when she starts to struggle until a warning sound emits from the machine and a red light goes on.
Too fast. Her heart is pumping too fast.
The doctor doesn't even look at her until the machine starts to make that noise, somehow oddly quiet and anticlimactic when set against the torrential panic that wants to rise in Sera's chest. She wants to move - to get up, to get out - but she can't. She can struggle until she rubs the flesh from her wrists and ankles and those restraints will still hold.
It's cruel, the way the doctor watches her - the way he looks down with this impassive gaze and then just... makes a little note on his clipboard. He doesn't speak to her. Doesn't ask if she's alright. If she needs anything. He just walks to the door, opens it and leaves.
Leaves her there, tied to the bed and struggling. Alone, apart from the little girl.
The girl though - she opes her eyes wide in sympathy and huddles deeper into her pillow, clutching a ragged old white teddy bear to her chest like it's some kind of life preserver.
"Are you scared?" she asks softly.
Serafíne"Fucking asshole."
That's what she mutters beneath his breath. The glance, the moment of contact. Her body arches above the fulcrum at the center of her spine. Strained and restrained. The panic: she does not so much will it away as she allows it to wash through her and over her. Somewhere within she finds that this is a choice. Even now, her heart's pounding and she's alive in the middle of that sensation, focusing on it, within it - trying - panicked, irrational, bright - to find some way to transcend it and leash it to her will and make that asshole let her go, but: too little, too late.
He makes his note and leaves. He makes his note and leaves her here and some part of her thrashes against that, right? Howls.
The girl, though. A snap-glance. Tear-bright eyes but still somehow she is an anchor, not the weighted sort.
Is she scared?
"'Yes," a quick, strange-sharp smile, like a needle. Breathless. "I hate hospitals." Pause, grimace, correction, this brief, bitterbright laugh. "I have a phobia of hospitals."
"Are you scared?"
time's passageIt isn't just the physical restrains that tie her down. There's something about this place - this room - that feels too sterile. Like (antimagick.) When she tries to reach out with her Will it feels like pressing against gauze.
The doctor leaves, and Sera howls. Maybe it's just in her head or maybe she actually opens her mouth and releases that howl into the room. If she does, it doesn't echo the way it should because apparently everything in this place is fucking restrained, even sound.
At some point the machine stops giving off that alarm, but the red light stays on.
Despite her panic, Sera manages a few breathless words to the girl. Asks her if she's scared too, and the girl nods. After a moment, she lifts herself into a seated position, still clutching the bear to her chest. There's something familiar about her face but Sera can't quite place it.
"My dad used to sing to me when I got scared. Does your dad sing to you?"
SerafíneShitshit shit shit shit.
The sense of restraint (not simply limbs: but Will) makes her want to throw herself against it all: physically, bodily, metaphysically all at once. She feels that and thrashes once more. A hard, physical yank against the restraints. Twists within them, against them, still breatheless as the girl answers.
"No." Grimace, even through the edge of panick. "My dad's kind of a shit. I sing to myself, though.
"I can sing to you, too. If you want. And maybe you can help me, too.
"Undo one of these?" The question punctuated by an arc of her wrist.
time's passageShe gives another yank and the restraint pulls at her wrist. It isn't sharp like the rocks or the wind or the cold. It's padded, see?
For her safety.
Sera's dad is kind of a shit.
The girl glances at the restraints and gnaws on her lip. She ducks down and huddles her small body around the stuffed animal in her lap, hugging it to her chest like a life preserver. She looks... uncertain.
Finally she steals herself - takes this slow, deep breath and climbs down off the bed. Her hospital gown hangs open in the back. Underneath she has on grey pajamas with little crows stitched into the fabric. When she gets to the side of Sera's bed, she touches the restraint around Sera's wrist, tracing her fingers over it experimentally. She starts to work at the buckle, but the leather strap is thick and heavy and she has to tug hard to get it to budge. Even then, it's slow-as-fuck going, and the girl starts to cry a little out of frustration.
Serafíne"What's your name?"
--
Padded. For her safety.
Safety is the last thing she wants, the least of the things she needs.
--
Her heart is still pounding and her throat is raw and she watches the girl from this slanting perspective, tied down, restrained, the corners of her eyes. Bright twinge of something, not precisely compassion but tied to it, some spasm of fellow-feeling for the gape in the back of the girl's hospital gown. The stutterstep of uncertainty, stealing herself, then movement.
The edge of a breath shunted out as the girl cries out in frustration and that breath is a worned wrapped around a note, shading its way into a song. Wordless right now because she hasn't found her way to the words that might belong to the girl, soothing right now. But also: rallying. "You can do it - " ragged yeah, the break in melody before it resumes. "Patience isn't my strong suit, either."
time's passageSera asks the girl's name and the girl glances up - meets her eyes in this meaningful way that feels like silent dialogue. Her eyes glisten in the too-bright lights of the hospital room. Up close, her irises look more grey than blue (cinder and ash.)
She doesn't answer. Maybe she can't. Maybe she won't.
But she does try to help. Works at the leather strap around Sera's right wrist with this frustrated determination, her tiny fingers shaking as she pries at the buckle. And Sera, she can barely keep herself together but even in the midst of her fear she finds the first tentative note of a song. And that note, the way it leaves her throat, is not unlike the tiny movement of the leather strap beneath the girl's prying fingers.
You can do it.
Patience isn't my strong suit either.
Sera's words resonate in the room, resounding in a way her earlier cries did not. Even soft - soothing - they echo.
When the girl hears the melody she stops, blinking back her tears. She takes a slow breath, exhaling in a long, gentle rush. Then she looks at Sera, leans across the bed and places a tender kiss on the curve of her cheek. Where her lips press against Sera's skin, she leaves this tiny brand of lingering warmth.
"We are never broken," she whispers. When she leans back, something finally clicks. The lines of her face, her ashen eyes. She's younger here but still, unmistakably: Leah. And somehow without her even touching it, the restraint on Sera's right wrist falls open.
"I think you gotta find your own words here."
When Sera blinks, she's gone. Only the stuffed bear remains, dropped on its side on the floor, to indicate she'd ever been there at all.
(That and the open restraint - but maybe Sera was the one who did that.)
SerafíneSera breathes out, all sharp, as the girl disappears and the restraint falls open and she registers the details that tell her that this: is Leah. Was Leah, or some echo of her, some memory made solid, some half-life of the girl stirred up from Sera's own subconscious, some floating dream, some real thing. It doesn't matter: everything's as real as you intend it to be. Maybe she was singing that lullaby-thing to herself; finding the notes. Finding the purpose to create them, threading her way through panick or even: harnassing the panick in service of something else, a reminder the bravery doesn't mean the absence of fear, so much as one's perserverance through it.
Here, the restraint is undone. Sera pulls her right arm free and twists to start working on the others. Left wrist; right ankle; right wrist. Cannot hide from the thrashing beat of her heart, like the panicked thrust of a wild bird's wings against and unwelcome cage, and maybe that makes her fingers clumsy, and maybe that makes her throat raw, but she takes all of that feeling and pushes it back in to her expanding self, pours that passion back into her desire to be free.
time's passageThere are layers to this, see? The graves, the hospital. When she pulls off those restraints and walks down the hallway will the world crumble again? Will there be something worse on the other side? Or something better?
Sera feels what she feels. Doesn't try to fight her fear so much as channel it. And then she's got her hand on the other restraint and she's fighting to get it open and... it's hard at first. Just like it was for Leah. It doesn't want to open but she does open it. Her heart keeps beating like a wild bird flapping in her chest but she doesn't scream - doesn't thrash. Doesn't let it control her.
Just uses it to push her forward.
She gets the restraint off her wrist. Then her right ankle. Then her left ankle. And each time, it gets a little bit easier.
Outside the room, the bustle of the hospital has gone quiet. There's no sign of the doctor (of any doctor,) no sign of the nurses running between patients. The hallway is empty.
If Sera tries the door, she'll find it open. There are no other doors besides her own - save one. At the far end of the hall, a pair of heavy double-doors leading outside with small glass windows looking out onto the street. It's nighttime, and she can just faintly hear the sound of rain pattering against the roof.
She's wearing a hospital gown, but her old outfit is still underneath it (minus the boots and the jacket.)
SerafíneThe supple thread of relief when she removes the last of the restraints. This moment where she's sitting upright entirely on the gurney, legs swinging, hands braced on either side of her thighs, where she closes her eyes and allows herself: to be. Panicked and afraid and within and above that fear; shaking, yeah. She's shaking, her hands are shaking her her thighs feel watery and loose and she simply: stops. Maybe she stops time, maybe she remembers the girl-she-was who couldn't unlock the restraints or perhaps unlocked them the only way she could, which wasn't - ever - physically.
Then her head drops forward and she braces herself, jumps off the gurney, the hospital gown a paper-whisper over her see-through dress and torn tights and she might've torn it off even were she not wearing her own clothes beneath but: she's wearing her own things. Tears off the stupid gown and crouches down and graps the left-behind teddy bear. Because she likes teddy bears and it looked lonely there on the floor and she doesn't really want to leave it behind in a shitty place like this.
Even if the shitty place like this is maybe in-her-mind.
--
She does try the door. She's not staying here: and lo, the door opens, and she's out in the hallway, glancing up and down the long dark stretch with a purposeful gait and tears on her cheeks that she doesn't bother to dash away.
The hallways ends in those double-doors. She pushes them open without a second thought, out onto the rainswept street.
time's passageShe takes the bear with her. It might be a symbol or it might be just a bear, but it doesn't belong in this hospital. The synthetic fibers of its white (off-white, really - it's too old to be white-white, it's lived too long to be clean but being clean is overrated) coat are soft and worn beneath her fingers where she grasps it. It doesn't turn into anything else in her hands.
Once the gown is off her body, Sera feels... lighter. Tears stream down her cheeks - relief or fear or anger or sorrow or maybe all of them intertwined and threading through her body and her heart. The tears feel like a kind of cleansing that's different from the hospital's antiseptic. They feel more like the rain that falls outside those double-doors.
She gets to the end of the hall and pushes them. Purposeful and without hesitation and... they open.
Outside, the street is rainy and dark - lit by yellow streetlamps that glow with these misty halos in the rain. The architecture is all wrong for Denver. It's older - brick and stone and wrought iron fences and the whole place has this feeling of being a bit haunted, between the fog and the old-old buildings and the heavy shadows that linger between the streetlamps.
There's a building across the street. Old, abandoned. It used to be a school.
Sera has been here before. When she looks at it, the wind picks up and utters this low, mournful howl.
SerafíneIf there's a stoop outside the doors, well. That's where she pauses. Just out of reach of the scent-of-the-place, all antiseptic and scrubbed-clean, all granular and regimented. The rain's falling even here. It mingles with the smear of tears that are sort of leaking from the edges of her eyes, smearing mascara and eyeliner as they fall. Maybe the rain washes her cheeks clean.
Maybe not.
It doesn't matter. She scrubs at her cheeks with the back of a hand, then sits on her haunches, taking in the dark, brooding hulk of a building - not a building - an estate - across the way. Still has the bear in her left hand and she brings it to her chest, holds it there. Listens to the night. The chaotic plash of rain-on-asphalt, that strange, singular loneliness that is so much sharper on rainy nights. So much more potent.
Then she takes the bear and sets it aside, in a comfortable nook, someplace a little bit protected from the wet. Doesn't belong in the hospital, but it doesn't belong there, either.
And there is where she is going to go.
--
These are different tears, now. Less torrential, you know? They come from someplace deeper, though. It's hard for her to even look at it becasue she cannot look at it without -
- deep breath. A brief, banked glimpse up the street. Down. Are her feet still bleeding?
It doesn't matter. She has that swaying gait still, all bravado, always forward, and she crosses the road to the (rusting) wrought-iron fence that surrounds the place. Doesn't matter if the gates framing the driveway are open. She'll still climb, scramble up up up and over, the way they did the first time. Jonah with his hand on her ass to boost her up, even though she didn't need it. Then Jonah hanging over the edge, dropping his pack down into her waiting hands, cursing at her when she almost-fumbled the play: careful, there's fucking glass in there.
She knows it better than she understands. The looming gables, the shattered, shuttered windows. The eerie sense of strangeness that made her skin prickle, that first time, in a way that made her: sharper, brighter, better. In a way that turned her on, then. Not this time. The formal gardens, left to rot and ruin, the black-mirror pools strewn with dead leaves, framed in lichen-studded granite, limestone, marble. The roses gone leggy, wild. Skirts them all and heads not toward the front door, but to one of the most accessible looking ground-floor windows and, once more, starts to climb.
time's passageDistance and space, like time, are strange in dreams. They get twisted and turned around. Stretched. Compressed. And maybe this isn't a dream, but it's something close. Sera remembers London, and this is not precisely what London looks like - more of a shadow, more of a gothic fairy tale. The real Lillesden is not across from a hospital. It does not sit smack in the middle of an old city street. This Lillesden is close because the thought of it is close.
The bear doesn't belong there, so she leaves it - tucked away in a barred windowsill. Then she crosses the street and climbs over the fence. Her feet weren't bleeding in the hospital, but the cuts reopen and leave dark little prints on the road where she steps. They don't stay there long. The rain washes the blood away like it does everything else.
The school - the estate - is sprawling. Covered in moss and vines. The lawn out front is wild and unmowed. Sera gets to the top of the fence and swings her leg over. As she does, one of the spikes at the top slices into her calf. Not deep enough to be serious, but deep enough to hurt. It draws a fresh well of blood from the wound that drips down the fence to land in a pattern of little drops against the earth.
More of her will bleed before she leaves this place. Though perhaps not quite so literally.
She's alone this time. Jonah isn't here to make the place seem like a dangerous adventure, and even if he were... it wouldn't seem that way now. Dangerous, yes. Aching, yes.
This place: Lillesden, is a graveyard. There's a strangeness and a hunger to its corroded walls and abandoned gardens. Terrible things happened here.
Rain wets her hair and clothes; mixes with her tears until the makeup runs down her face in dark streaks. It's cold, the rain. And without better clothes the cold will sink down and burrow into her bones. Make her shiver and shake for the lack of body heat. She passes the garden and the leaf-strewn pools and makes her way to the building proper, finds a window through which to enter and: climbs.
The window is unlocked, its dusty pane cracked down the middle. If she pulls on it, it will open.
Somewhere inside the school, there's a sound like rustling wings.
SerafíneSera doesn't mind the blood. Something about it seems right, and fitting and she only notices it in retrospect, really. This glance over her shoulder at the half-remembered corridor disappearing behind her, all dark. The floors, pristine. Maybe that's memory. Maybe that's magick. Maybe there's a little bit of both in each. Either way it makes her shiver.
Which she doesn't mind, either.
--
The ground floor lowest ground floor window is set in a half-crumbling stoneworked lintel above a boxwood, gone rotten at the center the way they all do, left to grow unchecked. They die in the middle, see, where the sun doesn't reach. Go all rotten unless tended, and tended well. And she's climbing - really, it's just a quick scramble - until, still shivering, wedged against the window she can start to pry it open.
Something stops her, midway. Or rather: she stops. The window cracked, the sound of something rustling within. Leans back and then lets herself drop back to the sodden ground. Glances and then looks - up and up and up - so that the whole of the structure looms above her. Strange little frown bisecting her pale brows, and then - for every reason and no reason at all - grief like a wave crashes into her. It takes her breath away, but oh -
somehow, she's still breathing.
No more lingering and fuck the goddamned window. Terrible things happened here. She slides between the decaying boxwoods, ducks past the broken downspouts, beneath the torrent of rainwater splashing off a broken eve. Cuts through the damp, overgrown grass and walks up the marble steps right to the front doors. Pushes them, uses the whole of her body weight if need be, then slips through half-expecting to find it still raining inside.
Stands there for a handful of heartbeats, just being, acclimatizing, aching and aware of that ache and also: listening, feeling the strangeness and the hunger, the terrible, virulent hunger. The rustle of wings - there.
She follows that sound.
time's passionsThere are holes in the roof. Leaks where rainwater drips down to sink into the sodden floors on the top level. The rain itself doesn't reach the ground floor but the humidity does - the mold and the decay. The doors resist Sera's weight when she pushes against them, creaking gradually inward on rusty hinges, and when they start to crack open a gust of pungent rot hits Sera in the face.
She gets the doors open and looks inside, standing at the precipice. The doors are a gate, and this is a passage.
Somehow she's still breathing, even as grief engulfs her. Even as it pours out of her heart like rainwater off a broken eave. This place is made of grief. It lives in the walls and the rusted pipes. It echoes with every creak of the foundation.
Sera follows the sound of the wings. The odd, leathery rustle of movement that she can hear just barely on the periphery of her senses. Decayed floorboards creak beneath her steps. Someone painted an image of mickey mouse being hung by a cord in an alcove at the end of the hall. From a distance it almost looks like a person. Up close, it's a macabre joke that makes the place feel all the more unnerving.
Or maybe it's not a joke. Maybe it's a warning.
(This is where childhood comes to die.)
Sera follows the sound. She can still hear the rain outside, beating against the bricks and sloshing into the sodden earth. Water drips from her hair and her clothes; blood from the lacerations on her leg and her feet.
Eventually she finds stairs. The stairs lead down to a basement, and in that basement she can hear, louder now, the sound of something moving, crawling, skittering. The stairs are dark. There is no power here with which to illuminate the place, but farther down, somewhere at the base of the steps Sera can make out a faint reddish hue - some unearthly glow.
This is where it happened. Down there, in a sealed room.
SerafíneThe passenger door was rusted shut. Something gone wrong, somehow inside, broken off. He'd done that after he convinced her to climb in the car, probably after he took off, slapdash through the rainslick streets, and maybe it was a plan all along but she still thinks, or rather - thinks, now; hopes, wants to believe perhaps, that it was a precipice, a current, a torrent. Something that just swamped him and left him - in that moment - too weak to do anything other than drown.
He threw her phone out the window somewhere south of Tunbridge Wells. They fought; she was mad, kept trying to grab the wheel and that's when he hit her - it was the only time anyone hit her - hard enough to snap her head back and make her see stars. Couldn't stop apologizing after that, hands white-knuckled against the wheel, some thing raw, and strange, and broken, and furious snarling across the surface of his face. Kept telling her - like he was trying to convince himself - that they were right, they were all right. The world was shit and the only way to fix it was to start the fuck over. Shatter it.
Remake the mold.
Hard to tell if he was trying to convince her, or himself.
Montague scolded him for the bruise spreading over her cheek and jaw. And then: apologized, lifting her chin, running his forefinger over her cheek. Were it more serious, I would have someone see to it. I think, though, it will heal just fine.
--
Made her want to throw up. Later, she did. In the corner of the windowless room with a mattress on the floor and a bucket for waste. White sheets with an old-fashioned print of tiny white daisies, which they let her keep because there wasn't anything from which she might hang herself. Someone - maybe it was a joke? - had whitewashed the walls in the room, but right over the peeling paint, the torn wallpaper, the crumbling plaster, without bothering to repair any of it.
No light. No way to tell day from night except she always knew. Could feel each second like a tattoo against her eyelids, the roof of her mouth, the back of her throat.
When he brought Claire in, she was half-conscious, bleeding heavily from the nose and scalp. Montague smiled, quite as charming as ever. They weren't prepared. He hadn't imagined they would have two such distinguished guests; they were only prepared for one. He hoped the young ladies would not find it a burden to share.
--
That was a long time ago; and it was / was not here. Here she crosses the threshold, assaulted by the scene of rot. Feels the floorboards spongy beneath her lacerated feet. Walks down the corridors that have the sort of familiarity that comes from a dream, or rather, a nightmare. Lurid, direct, sensational but stutterstopped.
She heads down; circles past the Mickey Mouse graffiti which even now draws a vague smirk out of her. The way it resolves into this macabre little joke after such a haunting suggestion from a distance.
Her sternum feels soft, like she could scoop the meat of her heart out with a melon baller, and she's so goddamned everything, all of it, all at once, when she finds the door, and knows it without knowing it. Right? except, even now, in the nightmarish context of the aftermath, the chaos of the raid and battle: but of course, she knows.
From the tips of her fingers to the muscular chambers of her too-soft heart, she knows.
And still: she opens the door.
time's passionsWhatever's down there with her, it avoids her at first. Slither-skuttles away somewhere into the deep recesses of the shadows as she descends the stairs. The red glow is the same color a heart would be if someone shone a flashlight through it. She's somewhere beneath the earth now and the walls down here have dripping stains from where moisture has seeped in though the foundation. Hunger yawns all around her, empty and aching and waiting.
She knows what she's going to find before she opens the door. And still, she opens it.
It's exactly as she remembers. Whitewash over peeling paint, a mattress with sheets dotted in tiny white daisies, a bucket for waste. No windows. No light apart from the dim glow of the hallway seeping in through the open door.
And on the floor, sprawled out in this mangled pose with her eyes gazing lifeless at the ceiling - is Claire.
This is not where they left her body. The real Claire is buried in a grave in England. But here, now... her body is as Sera remembers it from that day. The wounds on her head are still wet with matted blood. Decay has not yet crept in to claim her.
And then a voice, soft but resonant:
I knew you'd come back.
It is not the voice of the woman with the wild hair. It is not Claire's voice either. This is Montague - not the body of him but an echo, his presence haunting these halls even after death.
SerafíneThe family crypt in the peaceful graveyard of a lovely little Anglican church in Hampshire. A name added on a small bronze plaque. Inside, a spare desolation. At a certain hour of the day - late afternoon - the sun cuts through a small stained glass window set into the frame of the masoleum, casts prism of light on the dusty floor.
--
Hard to catalogue the injuries she suffered and better not to do so. She wasn't made for this and would never want to be remembered so damned - broken. Equally wrong, equally unfair, that in any iteration of any world, within or within, above or below, that she could be left just staring at the ugly spreading stain of some ugly black mold eating its way through the sloppy whitewash splashed over the ceiling.
That's why Sera crosses the room; sinks to her haunches and reaches out and closes her eyes, gently.
And she's crying again, so hard that snot is running out of her nose. Wipes it off on the back of her hand and is still: crying like that, openly and without censorship when that voice
from behind.
"Fuck you." That's her first instinct and she wheels on him, turning and rising and stalking forward. "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. You must think you're some kinda genius for figuring out that I'd come back. Congrats.
"I hope it's everything you ever dreamed of, because now I'm kicking your ass out.
"You don't belong here."
time's passionsSera doesn't cry the way that heroines in movies cry. Not that bright-eyed, single-tear, makeup-running-in-artful lines or maybe not running at all kind of crying. Real grief is messy. Real grief makes your face swell; leaves flushed red blotches and salt streaks and mucus dripping from your nose. That's what it looks like when your heart is being cut open. It is not clean. It is not pretty. It is: violent, torrential, human.
She closes Claire's eyes, because she shouldn't have to lie staring at the creeping mold of this place. Claire's body is a broken, bloody mess but Claire the person was beautiful. She was vibrant and clever and alive and she was Sera's friend.
She's the one who helped give Sera her name.
Then - that voice. And Sera whirls on it, stands up and turns around to face a man who is both there and not there. Fuck you, she says. You don't belong here.
The voice laughs. It sounds clear, mannered, pleased in a chilling sort of way. Then there is that sound again - wings rustling. Claws moving over torn plaster. In the hallway, the head and body of something impish and winged comes into view climbing across the wall. It's about the size of a medium-sized dog and shaped like something out of a medieval religious text. Its skin is this slick oil-black and it shines wetly in the red light.
There are others with it, creeping in on her slowly, curiously. Hungrily.
I always did like you, you know.
Serafíne"You're wrong."
--
Sharp breath out, this brief slash of a snarl-smile, the impression of her teeth, her heart beating, something beneath it, banked and withheld. She's breathing hard, and her dark eyes cut toward the things-creeping-up-behind-him and she flinches. This spasm of something in her cheek, some recognition of darkness beyond. Darkness that has settled here, resettled here; darkness he carries within him, which is not at all akin to the darkness she carries within her.
"About everything, really. I mean, that's gotta suck for you. First, your glorious whatever the fuck never happened, and I bet your masters were pretty pissed off about that. Second, you're still hanging around here reliving the glory days. Third, you lost everything. Fourth, I'm pretty sure you ass is dead. Fifth - "
There is this complex interloculatory set of layers happening. She is: closing her mind to him. Cementing that closure, building the effect with her - well, yes. Call it hate. Not the sort of hate on which his particular brand of nihilism might thrive, but something richer and more elemental. Better yet, call it fury.
" - if I were gonna pick a place to spend eternity, I'd go for Phuket or something.
"Not you.
"I want you out. Either way, I'm sure as hell not leaving her here with you."
With that, Sera turns decidedly around and sinks down to a low crouch, hunched over the blood-stained mattress, slides an arm beneath Claire's shoulders, another beneath her thighs. It makes her heart stop.
And then start.
And then stop,
and then start, all over again, to pick up that body, that memory of a body, which belonged to her friend, and her lover, the woman who named her.
"You never really broke her, you know? Not the way you thought."
time's passionsJust because I'm dead, Serafine - that doesn't make me powerless.
And she's right, of course. He is dead. The man whose voice she hears is not physically present before her. This is just his voice, his ghost, his legacy. The real reason she's here is lying there on that mattress.
Fury mixes with grief now, woven together like a net that Sera casts out over herself and Claire. Shielding them. Keeping him out because - he doesn't. fucking. belong.
Claire's body should feel heavy, and it does but - Sera doesn't have much trouble lifting her. Not physically anyway. The weight of it falls more heavily on her heart than it does her arms. The way it makes her stop and start. This slow, measured beat.
When she says that last thing (that he never really broke Claire,) the imps give this sepulchral chorus of shrieks and swarm the room, skittering past the door and over the whitewashed walls and ceiling. They close in like a mass of carrion ants, ready to devour them.
Until
They stop. Suddenly and with these scratching cries of frustration. There's a bubble of space around the mattress, and around where Sera now stands with Claire's lifeless body hanging limp and wet in her arms.
In the hallway, the red light dims. Then goes out.
The imps start to flap their wings, and in the dark it sounds like a sea of bats. Outside, something howls in the wind. Sera can feel wetness pooling around her feet, dripping in through the walls.
SerafíneThe imps startle her, pick up little spikes in her drumming heartbeat and yes, of course, she's shaking and her throat is raw and her shoulders are knotted and her head and heart and aching and there are tears in her eyes and everything about her is scrubbed flat and raw, abraded, bleeding,
"I'm not powerless either."
blazing, which she is now. This pulse of something from the bubble protecting Sera and the body she bears, because she has to bear it, because she has to face her grief, live with it and within it. This is not built from her fury, precisely, or her rage, nor precisely from her fears - of herself, once; of him still? sure, though it does not undo her, entirely, the way even the suggestion of his shadow might've, did, once-upon-a-time. All of it, all of it, is wrapped up in: love. Hungry, vibrant, visceral, set teeth-in-skin, rip-stars-from-the-sky, incandescent love of the flawed, breakable, broken, perfect world.
"GET THE FUCK OUT."
--
Doesn't wait to see if he does. She just puts her headdown and charges forward, Claire's body still in her arms.
time's passionsIt almost consumes her. The fury, the grief, the fear - the vibrant-visceral-incandescent love that wraps it all up and comes spilling out of her in that booming shout. The force of it comes spilling out of her like a torrent, weeping from her eyes and scratching her throat and even though she's standing in this small, sealed room it feels like she's floating in some infinite, limitless pocket of time and space and feeling.
Always feeling. Always so very raw and alive.
So much it hurts sometimes just to breath, just to look at things. And that's who she is, isn't it? It hurts because the world is flawed and breakable and perfect. As she is flawed and breakable and perfect.
And she is not powerless.
Not when she's strapped to a hospital bed. Not when she's sunk down in the middle of a jungle in Thailand succumbed to some perceived failure. (There's a sign there, at Wat Umong. It says: who never made a mistake never made a discover.) And certainly not here. Not even then, when she was so young and the man who called himself Montague had taken so much from her. The thing she did - killing Claire. That was an act of mercy and rebellion and, most of all - love.
She was never his. Would never have been his.
So she tells him to get the fuck out, and her voice is not consumed but consuming. It rips through her vocal chords and eviscerates the flapping, shrieking demons around her. She sees it when they fall because this little burst of light erupts around the room - silver and bright like the stars. She sees the imps with their oil-slick bodies and their bat wings shriek and disintegrate into ash.
She does not see Montague leave, because his body was never there, but she feels it. Feels the cold, hungry void of his presence rip itself from her presence like a sucking leech being pulled away. For a moment it clings on and she can feel it tearing at her chest, at her heart... and then it rips clean.
And he's gone.
And she's alone in the room with Claire and the water isn't just pooling around her feet now - it's rushing in like a torrent, seeping in through the walls and pouring down the stairs. The wind outside is howling like a hurricane. Upstairs, there is the sound of glass shattering.
time's passions[Edit: who never made a mistake never made a discovery.]
time's passions[Edit part 2: Feels the cold, hungry void of his presence rip itself from her mind]
SerafíneEach little burst body has this liquid brilliance, which expands and shatters like mercury and then: she can feel him -
- "fuck. fuck. fuck." -
tearing away, being torn away, from her sternum, her chest, her heart-and-lungs, that chakra, whatever the fuck it is called, that shatters and opens, and lets the world come rushing in. That seizure, that ripped-absence: she didn't realize, really, how close he was.
And then the flood.
From everywhere. From nowhere, all-at-once.
Sera hugs the Claire's body closer and drops her head: kisses the dead girl. On the brow, the closed eyes, the mouth - this long, enduring moment of absolute communion - before she gives the body that is not the body over to the torrent. That isn't her body and he is gone and the water is pouring in, rising and rising and rising, and it will carry her higher, too. Here isn't here is everywhere, yesterday and tomorrow.
And then Sera is gone: moving. Running through the rooms to the steps, rising with the water, climbing and climbing and climbing not because she is trying to outrun the water, but because she has this great goddamned desire to see where it goes, to give herself over to it, to be caught - somehow - between the sky and the earth.
Maybe she climbs to the very top of the ruined school. Maybe she stumbles out onto the street. either way: she runs.
and runs.
and runs.
time's passionsSera leaves Claire's body to the water. Just as she herself runs to see where it's coming from - and where it leads. She almost slips on the stairs because it's rushing so hard the current nearly rips her feet out from under her but she doesn't slip and - keeps going.
Gets back to the ground floor and can see the water pouring in through those open doors. More windows shatter. The walls of Lillesden start to groan like they're coming apart. Outside the doors, chunks of masonry fly past on the wind. Pretty soon this whole place will be torn down; this massive, sprawling stone structure taken apart by something as ephemeral as a storm.
The water is up to Sera's knees by the time she stumbles outside. And there, standing in what used to be the lawn but is now just a rushing cascade of water is - the woman.
The water doesn't pull at her the way it does Sera. The wind dances around her as though she is some kind of epicenter. When she sees Sera, she looks at her, reaches out her hand and says: Do you still want what you came here for?
SerafíneSera takes the woman's hand and it's not like taking the woman's hand, no. She seizes it. Drags her in or vice-versa, and she's crying still, but who can in the rain, laughing and bright and shaking and the storm has this cyclonic movement that she can feel in the fine bones of her ears, this electric hum that makes her tongue taste like copper, or maybe that's blood from where she has lacerated her own tongue.
"Fuck yes." Kisses the woman, right on the mouth. "I want everything."
And there she is: trying to dissolve into the flood, have her sternum cracked open and her ribs broken and her heart burning in the sky. There she is: on her knees with grief. It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.
"Every goddamned thing."
time's passionsThere isn't any hesitation. Sera seizes the woman's hand and it's difficult to tell, in that moment, which of them is pulling who or if that distinction even matters because they are - one. One mind. One body. One heart. Sera kisses the woman and the feeling that floods into her is both consuming and consumed. It is becoming. It is undoing.
The storm floods her lungs.
Her body breaks apart (but she is not broken [she is never broken even when she is breaking]) and her mind flings itself into the wind.
Time stops then. Everything coalesces in this infinite moment - every experience, every passion blooming in this impossible plateau.
This is the eye of the storm. This is the fountain of life.
There is no measurement to this - no way of adding up the amount of time she spends here because this is a place where time does not exist.
But she does, at some point, come back from it. Because in the material world there is still a body that belongs to her. And a life that aches to be lived. So:
Her heart starts to beat again, and she can feel the weight of her body and the cold snap of the winter air and the soft slide of leather against her skin (she did not lose her jacket after all) and suddenly there is this blink and there is the world.
There is the stalled traffic and the frozen 20-somethings caught in the midst of their argument.
Nothing has moved - because no time has passed.
And then: a gust of wind.
And it starts again.
