I'm glad you came.

Hawksley

It's been weeks -- longer -- since he's heard from Sera. He's heard from Dan at least, those few terse texts exchanged where some of his WHAT. THE. FUCK. got answered. There's nothing he can do. That was made clear. And truth be told, right this moment, he is not thinking about Sera's state of being. He's sitting on his enormous sectional couch, feet propped up on the glass coffee table, watching Netflix emptily. He is wearing lounge pants.

Serafíne

What happens is: she walks. Up the goddamned steps because the elevator call button does not work and she cannot choose a floor even if she wants to. Even if she is standing close as you please to a stranger, some dowager maybe, rising-rising-rising. Sid-the-dog beside her, and there are breaks, because penthouse means: some height, some kind of view.

And she stands in the hallway for - some time, really.

The front door opens. And he is not thinking about Sera or about Sera's state of being but: there it is. Sera walks - in.

Hawksley

It's a tall building. And of course he lives in the fucking penthouse. Always loves a view, this one. It's late enough that no one bumps into her. Or the dog. She cannot hear the television through the door; thick walls.

But Hawksley hears the door open, alert, eyes sharp as the bird he is named for and calls to mind. Looks at the door and sees Sera and his brow furrows deeply. He doesn't note the dog. He doesn't turn off the television. He's moving, remote thrown down, crossing the room over to her immediately.

Serafíne

The dog at her heels, threading between her legs, calls to mind one of the old goddesses, Some virgin huntress. But he doesn't notice Sid, just Sera. That wildness to her that feels somehow more savage in this precise moment. She is: watching him, right? Sharp, but not the way he is sharp.

Wants to say something, but her throat -

- it's so fucking strange to be seen. She has no idea what she wants to say.

Hawksley

So she doesn't say anything, and he puts his hands on her jaw. Both hands, like he's about to start mauling her mouth with one of those savage kisses that they haven't shared in -- well. Not for a long time. Even the way they kissed at his birthday party wasn't like that.

But he is not kissing her. He just cups her face in his hands like that, frowning down at her, staring at her. Saying nothing. Just staring. His eyes flick: take in her features, glance down between them, like he's checking her over. He notices the dog; he doesn't mention it. He looks into her eyes.

For a while.

He is frowning deeply all that while.

And then he wraps his arms around her, bare because Hawksley is always fucking walking around without his shirt on, and tucks her head underneath his head. Says roughly, finally: "Dan told me what happened."

Serafíne

She goes stiff when he touches her, when he cups her jaw. Right through the shoulders and the spine and she is caught between the desire to - her need to be touched - and the part of her that has built up this strange and shocking carapace of singularity.

- well, stiff. Rigid muscles framing that spare frame. Looks the way she does when she is peeling away each and every one of her reserves, shedding all her skins to find some made, molten care. Thin and sharp and hungry.

Doesn't really sink into him even when he wraps his arms around her and tucks her head beneath his, but she does breath out - once. This diaphragm hitch as if she were on the verge of letting go.

Then she starts to pull herself away from him. "I'm sorry - I don't - " She's shaking, you know? "I don't think I want to be touched right now."

Hawksley

Doesn't want her to sink into him. Really doesn't. (Liar.)

But at least: he doesn't blame her for it. For going stiff. For not sinking. For pulling away. And when she does, he unfolds. Takes his jaw from off her head and releases her face from his hands and lets his arms fall to her sides. She starts to say she's sorry and he shakes his head, talking at the same time:

"Don't -- you don't have to --"

She's shaking. He is not. She says she doesn't want to be touched and he just nods, once. Steps to the side and makes sure the dog won't get its tail stuck, then closes his door. It has a soft click-thud to it. He still doesn't lock it. On the television is an old episode of Arrested Development. It's still playing, a weird backdrop. Hawksley glances at the dog and thinks only: it had better not shit on his carpet. He walks away from her, picks up the remote, turns off the television. The room goes silent and he looks at her again.

"Do you want a drink?"

Serafíne

Quick little flash of her dark eyes: up when he asks that question. Sidelong only because of their relative positions in the room and there is something alive and strange and aware and chasing-through about the look and she drops one hand to the crown of the dog's head, right between the ears.

Does she want a drink?

"Yeah."

Sera does that weird thing people do somethings: frowns and kinda nods after she answers, like hey, she's agreeing with herself. Or asking the question again in her head and answering. It's weird to talk, and have someone talk-back. It's really, really hard for her to hold herself together. But hey - she does.

Hawksley

Hawksley goes to the kitchen. Big, open penthouse this is. Few walls. Few barriers. Makes sense. He goes, and opens a couple of cupboards until he comes out with a stout bottle full of crystal-clear liquid. Sets that on the counter. Sets out a couple of shot glasses.

Then he gets a lime out of the basket and slices it into wedges, watching her.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but... what are you doing here?"

Serafíne

Sera, she follows him through. Trailing, and the dog trailing with her. Where the carpets are plush their footsteps are soundless, but then they give way to expensive hardwoods, or marbles, maybe, and Sid's nails click-clack-click on the foor.

The tequila makes her smile. This brief, chasing thing as she sidles up to the counter and pulls out a stool. He tells her not to take this the wrong way, but - and there's a flash; her eyes on his profile. The smallest flinch, just her shoulders, really, easy to overlook. It's hard not to take that question the wrong way.

She tries, though. Wants to tell him that she doesn't know but he is the only one who ever calls her on that shit so she doesn't try it (much) with him anymore.

"I was - close. Ish? And I was lonely. And I wanted to see you."

Hawksley

Make no mistake: Hawksley knows, and has known for a long time before he ever met Sera, that he is an asshole. And that he is selfish. And that he is self-centered, self-involved, and that his self-interest has the capacity to be ruthless. Being in the Order has only doubled down on that intrinsic trait. He is, among all these other things, self-aware.

So he knows that when she says she wanted to see him and it causes a momentary spreading warmth in his chest, it's sort of a douchebag thing to feel. She's not okay; he doesn't even ask if she's okay because he knows she isn't. Of course she's fucking lonely: she can't talk to people or dance with people or see her friends or be Sera. She's miserable, and here he is getting happy that she wanted to see him.

Hawksley doesn't think to offer the dog a treat, or a bowl of water. He just ignores it. He slides the cutting board of wedged limes across the bar counter to her, and a shot glass, and pours hers full: a double. Gives himself the same. Taps his glass to hers, taps it on the counter, and downs it, follows it with a harsh bite of lime.

Breathes out through pursed lips.

"I'm sorry," he says, not looking at her but at the counter.

Serafíne

This slash of a smile from her, unbidden. Something about the shot glass or the way he taps them. Whatever. Maybe it's the limes or the reflection of the lights in the viscous liquid. She takes her with a neat care, fingertips stippled over the glass, and breathes out sharp and does the shot. Then lime, yeah. Doesn't bother with salt, not even the salt from her skin.

And he tells her he's sorry and she gives him this sharp shake of her head. No.

"It's not your fault," all matter-of-fact or as close as she can come to it. Then a hitch, more shoulders than diaphragm but a little of both and her brows together and, yeah: miserable. Miserable. "I just - I just fuck everything up."

Hawksley

Neither of them bother with salt. Hell: in a pinch, neither of them bother with lime.

She shakes her head, she tells him it's not his fault, and he quirks a brow at her. She says she fucks everything up.

"Wasn't saying sorry about your... situation," he clarifies, nodding at her as though she really were invisible. Even to him. "I'm sorry that it took me nearly a month to even find out why I wasn't hearing from you."

A moment. He's silent. Takes a breath and refills their glasses. Hers; his own. Heat from the first double shot is already spreading through his body. It helps.

Sets the bottle down again. Picks up his shotglass; offers it to her to clink.

Serafíne

That's pretty much the only thing he could say in that moment to startle her from her brooding self-pity. She looks up at him, mouth open, brows narrowed. Eyes damp but you know. She's shaking, just a little bit, but she's not crying. More like this irregular shiver. Every now and then. Like her body hasn't adjusted to the temperature in the room.

"I don't - I don't know what to fucking say to that."

Hawksley

So he shrugs. She isn't tapping her glass to his. So he doesn't wait. He takes his second shot. Bites lime. Sucks the juices down and looks at her as he swallows, licks his lips.

"Whatever you want to say," he says, and perhaps it should come off as glib, or cheeky, meaningless. It doesn't. Looking at her steadily, despite the booze trickling into his bloodstream. Whatever she's got: say it. There is the sense that it will be okay. Or at least: he will accept it.

Serafíne

Oh, god. He says that and she: looks up and now she starts to cry. This expression on her face: open, raw and vulnerable and for several: whatever they are, seconds, minutes, neither, all, she cannot really say anything. She just cries and looks at him with this strange mixture of pain and wonder and whatever so plain on her features.

Sniffs, finally. Her throat is opening and she can speak again. "You're always in my head, you know?"

Hawksley

He is grateful for tequila. And he weathers the way she cries and the way she looks at him because he decided when he heard what was happening that whatever it was, he would take it. Had to.

Hawksley blinks. Slow. Really: he closes his eyes for a moment, and nods as he opens them. "I know."

It isn't arrogance. It's understanding. It's I get that.

And it's still an apology.

If they go too far down this path, though, who knows what else he'll say. He reaches over the counter and touches her hand with his. His fingertips cover the back of her hand; one fingertip rests over the ring he gave her, which answers to his touch with a flare of soaring, sundrenched warmth. He thinks he should ask her if she wants it disenchanted, if it hurts her. But he thinks she could do that herself, or get someone else to, if she wanted. He thinks that even if it hurts her, she chooses to let it. Really not his place to question that.

Beyond that: well. Other thoughts. Other reasons.

"I want you to stay," he says, and then, because he is a coward and an asshole: "tonight."

Serafíne

Some part of her cannot handle that apology. It makes it real. Right? What he's done. The way he's left her. The way he left her. The way everyone always leaves her. So she looks at him and she lets herself feel that pain, all of it, somehow brightest on her scapulae. You know: where her burning wings should be rooted. Feels the rest of it, too.

He says I know and she doesn't think it's arrogant. She: gets that he gets it and she is reaching for her shot then, throwing it back, grateful for it. The warmth, the rush. The sudden flush beneath her skin.

His hand on hers and she's still not sure she wants to be touched. Makes it harder to be not/touched for so long, after. But fuck she also wants to be touched and makes this raw noise in the back of her throat and turns her hand over beneath his. The crawl of her tattoos on her dusky skin. Over her pulse at her wrist, framing her palm and fingers, yeah, though not on her palm. Sharkscissors covers her left palm. She wears his ring on her right index finger.

And yes: she's still wearing it. Even now. Sometimes it hurts her. Sometimes it makes her ridiculously happy, silly girl.

--

He tells her he wants her to stay. Tonight. And she cannot respond to that, really: so she tells him she wants another shot. God that's quick: she's eaten nothing. It makes her giddy, it makes her blood sing. It makes the room spin, just the way she likes.

She does stay: one night. She's still sleeping when he leaves for his day,

and she is also: gone when he returns.

Hawksley

Christ. She touches his hand and he grips hers, firm but not sudden, not grasping. Still: it's immediate. He holds her and thinks that if he lets the tequila have its way he's going to --

So he squeezes her hand and he lets her go.

--

They do another shot. They are drunk. The room spins for her and she feeds the dog and maybe she takes a bath. He goes to bed; he doesn't tell her to take the spare room. He doesn't tell her to do anything. So when she comes to his bed and he is still sort of drunk and actually quite sleepy he just opens one eye and looks at her. Smiles a little. Goes to sleep. Her fucking dog sleeps on the floor, or on top of Sera's feet. Whatever.

When he wakes up, his hand is on her waist, his forearm crossing her stomach. He leaves her a note: eat whatever she wants. He'd tell her Collins is downstairs but Collins can't interact with her anyway. He tells her, on the note,

I'm glad you came.

It is signed - H.

--

She is gone when he comes back. He knew she might be. It is why he didn't tell her that he'd see her later. It is why he didn't leave in the note a question about getting dinner. He is relieved that she is gone, and he is aching because she is gone.

Empty,

because she is gone.

br />

Unopened.

Midnight and near-full-moon looming over a town that doesn't seem to have a name, just a center square and dark faces of one-and-two story buildings like something out a movie lot all dark now except for the neon open sign still blazing in the picture window of a clearly-closed thrift shop. And the bus station of course, which shares space with a 24-hour laundromat, the ugly wash of bare fluorescents smeared over the vaguely stained bisque of near-antique industrial washers. No passengers waiting and no reason to idle except for the corporation tracking. Gotta hit the marks and the marks say he has to wait until seven minutes past this godforsaken hour and he isn't going to bother opening the doors except the pregnant girl in the third row from the back lurches up the aisle, asks how long they're here, and insists he open the door because she has to pee and wants an egg salad sandwich from the vending machine.

No reason to slip off here, except she feels like it.

So they do.

That's how it works.

Spend the rest of the night laid out in the center of the grassy square, dog with its muzzle settled over its crossed paws, girl laid out all open like she's trying to make snow angels without any snow, golden hair strewn all over the damp grass, shivering until she tells herself not to be cold anymore, and she isn't, is she? senses blown open, staring at the stars.

It snows before morning. She wakes to the gentle dusting over the grass, snowflakes caught in her eyelashes, melting against her skin.

Leaving it all behind.

October 23, 2015

Serafíne is not yet used to being a ghost. She will be, before this ends. She will become familiar with silence, with the rhythm of her own breath, with the concourse of her own thoughts. With absence, both as a fullness and as a presence, physical, tangible, total. On a day not long from now she'll climb onto a Greyhound bus in downtown Denver and: leave.

No point in staying to haunt the edges of a life that used to be hers.

Or, rather: haunting is such a slushy, stagnant thing to do with whatever remains of one's consciousness.

She'd rather move.

She'd rather do.

She'd rather be.

No idea where the thing is going but hey, that's part of the point. The glass is cool against her cheek, and the dog curls up on the floor, beneath her feet. She has a bottle of Stranahan's and a lump on her back she will remember eventually is her backpack. The moon in the glass, fat and shining, the highway this running artery of light. The staccato pinpoints of headlights that flare and shine like animal eyes in the darkness.

Her breath makes a shadow no one can see.

She curls up, for the duration.

Hangtime

Elijah

He had ducked out the back of a bar for a much needed moment to breathe.

Santa Fe looked very different when you weren't looking at the store fronts. The allies and the backs of buildings and the trash cans all made the places look the same. There was the occasional puddle, the loose gravel and hints of grass trying to stubbornly shove itself up through the pavement and say that it endured, because it is true and strong. Elijah wonders, briefly, if the Order felt strongly about weeds, how they persisited. How they were the epitome of something exerting their will upon their environment.

Weeds will grow because they want to. How dare anyone try and say otherwise.

But there he was, sneaking out the back of a bar with his top button unbuttoned and for the first time in a long time feeling like he was drowning in the open air. Feeling smothered by the actuality of the world around him and tonight, yes tonight, he was trying so goddamned hard to be present. COuld have gotten shitfaced but, instead, was outside of a bar in the back alleys sober, deciding instead that he needed to walk. Needed to pace. Needed to recenter himself before he rejoined the rest of the world and pretended that his best friend wasn't in mortal fucking danger. That there was nothing he could do about it.

That he could pretend that one of his other friends was dearly hurting, so disconnected and curled in on herself and splitting apart and he doesn't even know where the fuck to find her. Knows someone is taking care of her but, frankly, given who it is Elijah feels like his world is resting too much on the shoulders of a man who he has barely met. Trusts, yes. But perhaps...

Perhaps.

He makes his way through the back alleys, wonders if he should try and score something harder than whatever he could comfortably get from Samir.

Being present is fucking hard.

Serafíne

AWARENESS!

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) [Doubling Tens]

Serafíne

Weekend and still early enough that the bars and galleries are packed and there's foot traffic, not so much in the back alleys where Elijah has gone to pace but still: a cater-waiter taking out the trash, a prostitute with a short man in a dumpy suit negotiating at the back entrance to a dive bar. And so on.

Chilly but not precisely cold, with banks of clouds slipping across the sky, and between the clouds and the light pollution there's not even a hint of the stars tonight. Not from the downtown streets.

Elijah finds Sera on the empty patio of a small bistro (the last few patrons inside linger over after dinner drinks and desserts). Coincidence this, really. No reason, but sometimes the world functions like that. Things fall apart, other things are put together again. She's sitting on one of the wooden tables set back against a brick wall. In summer these are shaded by great big offset market umbrellas but the umbrellas have been taken down: either for the night or for the winter. The chairs are locked down and shunted forward against the table, but there she's sitting, leaning back against the brick, legs crossed at the ankles, wearing her curb-stompers and fishnets and a leather skirt that is half-metal rings, an old Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt, a flannel shirt, a leather jacket.

Leaning back against the brick, smoking a joint, one hand resting on Sid's big head. The dog, of course, curled up beside her.

Banked glimpse toward Elijah out of the corner of her eye as he emerges from the mouth of the alley next door. "I knew you were around." Closes her eyes again, takes another drag. "No one else feels like you."

Elijah

He exhales, hard and harsh like he took a hit of something that was too strong and it didn't feel good in his lungs. Like he was fifteen and lighting up for the first time because it seemed like something that could be fun or it got passed to him at a party and you fucking go for it, freshman. If you're gonna party with seniors, you don't wuss out.

"What do I feel like to you?" he asked, "I know how i see you, but it never really hit me to ask how I come across on a-" waves a hand, doesn't want to flat out say metaphysical level and words are failing him "-y'know. I get a lot of hurricane but I could never really swallow the irony."

comes her way, because she is there, and she is present and she isn't some ghost to him. Then again, where ghosts ever just something to him, either? For all intents and purposes, this is just another sepctre he could spend the night talking to. He takes a seat by the bricks so he isn't towering over her. Doesn't take much, it feels like.

Except he knows that isn't the case, in his perception Sera had never been small, just like she had very rarely been human save for those moments that reality was unkind. Thinks about whatever one-sided conversations they've had when she's been out and he's been introspective.

Serafíne

"Mmmm." She is quiet tonight; or if not tonight: now and her voice hums in her nose and mouth. She is: considering his resonance and something about the lilt of her chin or the set of her jaw is reminiscent of a wine tasting. That consideration. Shifts the joint from one hand to the other and offers it to him if he wants, then turns that first hand over like she was holding a hidden stone inside her palm.

There is no stone, nothing there, just her skin, and she wonders what sort of magick it would take to show him a visual representation, an illusion, an allusion.

Instead: "Ever been sailing?" A beat, a moment of recognition or not. "Ever been caught out in a gale?"

Elijah

He settles in, takes the joint and takes a hit because it's there. Because he's tense, because it's offered and hospitality, you see. Holds his breath and hands it back. She's there and she's been there for... he doesn't know how long. Serafine has a taste for these things. He doesn't... she just knows. Doesn't know how she knows, but she does.

She asks if he's been sailing, and he laughs. Something small that makes the breath escape from his lungs and lets the remnants of smoke out into the air.

"I've never been sailing," he says, smiles a little, "I actually kind of find the idea fucking terrifying."

Serafíne

That brings her dark gaze quite immediately back to his face. This slanting glance, half-shadowed by her lashes, half-shadowed by something else, entirely. Still, look, see: aware. Alive to the nuance of expression. And she kind of straightens, stretches through the spine enough to lean up-up-up and kiss him on the temple.

Soothing, affectionate. He finds the idea terrifying.

And, really, she should have known.

"Then I'll find another fucking metaphor. You feel like a storm on the horizon, and the monarch trying to outrun it."

Elijah

"To me, you'd always been... just this gut feeling, when you're right at the edge of falling off of something and you're in that moment of hangtime. Like fucking skydiving," he said, had a smile on his face and his voice was tinged with fondness.

He didn't quite know whatshe needed, what would keep her anchored and present. What would keep the pot holding on to the kettle as it were. It was a struggle to remain in the moment sometimes when your mind can go so many other places, "but yeah... I fucking loved that feeling. It's before you ever even consider opening your parachute."

Serafíne

"Parachutes are playing it safe when you can learn how to fly."

The quick, wry curve of her mouth, mostly hidden by shadows. She tips her head to the side and rests her temple on the young Hermetic's shoulder. Gives him a little nudge with her elbow.

"I'm alright, you know? You should go on with your night. See where it takes you."

Elijah

She says she's alright and there he is, her temple on his shoulder and he closes his eyes. Takes it in, feels what is there and the weight of her head and the residual softness of her hair and drinks in that wry smile or smirk or grin or whatever it is that she wears.

She tells him she's alright.

"... I would rather spend my night with someone I don't have to lie to," he confides, "even if we sit here the whole night and don't say a goddamned thing."

calling and not calling my ex

Serafíne

Last night Sera couldn't hold her head upright and needed repeated reminders to put on her seatbelt. Drifted the whole of the drive back to the Monaco with her temple against the cool glass and her legs drawn up but turned akimbo on the seat. Talked some between these clear, deliberate, deliberative breaths she was drawing in like she could consume something in the air itself and maybe get fractionally higher. Refused any help that might've been on offer with a stubborn, drunken persistence. Spent the first half of the night curled up more-or-less clothed in the empty bathtub attached to one of the bedrooms. Got up at six a.m. or so and puked, then crawled into bed, curled up in one corner with her stuffed rabbit. Sid sprawled on the floor at the foot of the bed. Something in that dog's history tells it that certain spaces belong to people, but the floor is always free for the taking.
--
Sera sleeps for a long-ass time. Gets up at the ass-crack of 4 p.m. or so, hung over and ready for her tea. Is about to go out into public spaces of the suite wearing panties and the hotel's silky black bathrobe, but remembers that there are more-or-less strangers around, so you know, probably they are not necessarily used to mostly-naked Cultists waking up in their space. She pulls on a worn-soft t-shirt and is now only about 65% naked. Pads out with her hair a wild tangle all around her face, scratching idly at her ass and thinking about having her tea and then: having not a goddamned thing to do with the rest of her day.

Fuck. Everything sucks.

She finds something to eat and something to toss to Sid and an abnormal amount of time trying to figure out the single-serve coffee/tea machine, feeling every inch of her hangover. What the hell else does she have to do with her day?

Michael

By the time Serafíne has crawled her ass out of bed and decided she's ready to attempt to start the day Michael has returned from whatever the hell it is he's doing with his time in Denver. It isn't seeing the sights. Not unless the sights happen to align with his mission.

Eventually he has to come back to the room and tend to his physical needs.

He's about to take off his suit jacket the second he walks into the suite. Then he sees the Cultist is stumbling around attempting to figure out life. Her options are Hang Out In The Communal Area or Retreat Back To Her Side.

"Hello, Sid!" the Euthanatos says when the dogs come over to sniff at his shoes and ankles. Crouches to greet him proper before he turns his attention to Sera. "How are you feeling?"

Serafíne

"Fucking brilliant," Sera rasps, in a voice that says she is anything but brilliant. In the interim she has gotten out both her phone and her sunglasses. The former still doesn't fucking work and she slips it back into the pocket of her robe with an almost slinking guilt. The latter she slides down from the crown of her head to shade her eyes. Nevermind that they are inside and it is October and the sun is turning its face away from the earth. "Another glorious day in paradise. Sid and I were talking about going out to Castlewood or something."

Sid, of course, is stretching, sniffing, wagging her tail. Likes it when Mike gets down on his haunches to match her, and gives him several playful sniffs before she turns in one of those playful wheel-aways like she's ready for action. Of course she is. Sera has been passed out for hours.

"Were you checking on Jenn?"

Michael

Global warming hasn't had an impact on the rotation of the earth. The days are growing shorter. They will continue to shorten until it seems as if nothing has been left behind.

Dog people are impervious to the weather. Mike is most definitely a dog person. He also seems to think that Sera was joking about going out to Castlewood. There's nothing in Castlewood but nature. That may be the sort of thing a young woman who cannot interact with other people craves. If she can't have one extreme there's always the other.

He isn't judging her. He's scratching Sid behind the ears and getting her all wound up in preparation to take her outside.

Was he checking on Jenn.

"I was," he says. Bright. It seems as though Jenn is in good shape. Then something dawns on him. It doesn't take long. "You know Jenn."

Serafíne

"I know Elijah more than I know Jenn," the creature shrugs. Wasn't joking about Castlewood and isn't reading his mind so she doesn't know where he goes with his assumptions and might not care, and it's not so much that she craves nature specifically as that she craves: strain, movement, striving, and everything that knits itself together into all of that.

Doesn't look like the sort who would go climbing, though. Not standing there in her expensive lingerie and silk robe and Prada sunglasses, still indulging her hangover with whatever the fuck she can find in the suite.

"He was telling me about you and Jenn and the dude she drew and shit. Said he was trying to get her to go into hiding while you got a handle on the Fallen, but that she wasn't having it.

"I don't blame her. That would fucking suck."

Gee, Sera should know.

"That why you're here? The Fallen?"

Michael

Earnestness even though he doesn't open his mouth to concede that Sera has the right idea in this. Even though when he does open his mouth he doesn't swear. Doesn't qualify things as sucking or not sucking. He would have said that Jenn deserved to retain her autonomy and make her own decisions. Informed consent. That's what they offered her.

The Euthanatos gives Sid a few sound thumps on the flank before he stands upright again. He tucks his hands into the pockets of his slacks and gives a quick glance to see if the dog's leash is lying around anywhere. It's the quickest of quick glances. Other than that Sera has his undivided attention.

"Yes," he says.

That's all he has to say about that. He's not averse to answering more questions and she doesn't get the impression that he doesn't want to discuss the Nephandus.

Serafíne

Her attention is on him, too. Perhaps it is not so undivided, though it is difficulty to tell given the round, reflective surface her sunglasses present to the world. Lenses large enough to obscure the whole of her eyes and mosts of her straight brows. Delicacy framing them, of course, which is hard to reconcile with her rather filthy mouth. Maybe the friendship between the Chorister and the Ecstatic is as difficult to reconcile as well.

From a distance.

Still, he says Yes and he sees that she's looking at him for more than a second or two. There is hang-time in that look, an awareness that is sharper than most who do not know her would give her credit for.

"You got a bead on 'em?"

Steady, steady, steady. Maybe she's banished her hangover already.

Maybe she uses the sickness the same way she uses the pleasure: to Work, and Work Through. Any port in a storm.

Michael

"I believe so."

Those of his Essence don't incline towards stillness. He is not quite so tall as their mutual friend the Chorister but he has a trim build that speaks of perpetual motion and that motion reasserts itself now that they're discussing the Fallen and it's occurred to his bones that he's been standing in the same spot for longer than a few seconds.

To the single-serve coffeemaker he goes.

"This is the closest I've come to zir in several lifetimes." He uses a genderfluid pronoun to refer to the Nephandus. Make of that what you will. "For obvious reasons I'd prefer to not outright scry on zir, but if it comes to that, I'm prepared to."

Serafíne

"Several lifetimes?" The lilt of inquiry in her voice even as the immediate beat of her attention drops away. Sera has opinions about reincarnation. Not possibility of it (everything is possible, everything is permitted), but about the bullshit insanity of it. Look at the shit some goddamned ancient asshole tried to do with a perfectly lovely new girl in a perfectly lovely new body not that long ago right here in Denver.

She settles her lovely ass on the back of the couch. Feet on the cushions, tea in hand. Tastes better when someone else makes it.

"You spend all of those lives hunting it?"

Michael

"I'm not sure, to tell you the truth."

The Chorister had done the both of them the favor of keeping what he knew about their lives and their individual quests to himself. He has said nothing of Sera's failed Seeking to Michael and mentioned very little of Mike's pursuit of an unaging Nephandus to Serafíne.

Must have figured it would give them something to talk about. If Sera had to stop and talk to him on her way out the door that would keep her out of trouble. Francisco Echeverría can be a conniving bastard when he really wants to be.

His coffee finishes spitting into the mug and he puts the hand not responsible for holding its handle back in its pocket. Turns towards Sera and leaves the mug sitting on the cupboard until it's cool enough to sip.

"Something tells me it's been the other way around. I have strong memories that come to me in dreams sometimes, but I have no way of accessing them while I'm awake, if you catch my drift."

Serafíne

"How long have you had those dreams?"

Quiet. Still-voiced but look, yeah. She lifts her chin and looks back at him, dark glasses gleaming, mouth mostly still. Something both quick and tender about the way she holds herself, as if she were readying to alight or aloft. Rubs the old bronze ring on her right index finger with her right thumb. Always does when she's anxious, thoughtful, pensive.

Michael

If it makes him uncomfortable to talk about himself and the past that has led him to this moment it is visible only in the way the light hits his eyes. She knows what it is to have caught a Fallen's eye. To be at the locus of a twisted mind's attention. He does not know this about her.

Elijah did say the Euthanatos is an honest man though. Ask and ye shall receive.

"Oh... since I Awakened. I'd imagine it was a package deal." A quick lopsided smile. An attempt at lightening the mood. "These particular dreams, though, the ones that led me to believe ze and I have met before, began a little over two years ago. After my last Seeking. I've been investigating zir since then."

Serafíne

"One of them wanted me when I was a baby-mage." Now he knows that about her. No one else in the city does, though. There is a bitter-sweet simmer of a half-smile friable across her mouth. She does not respond to his attempt to lighten the mood. Doesn't believe in that shit, which always feels to inauthentic, so lightly inhabited. Lightening the mood. "Didn't show up in my dreams so much as in person.

"There was another one, here in Denver? Wanted someone else more than he wanted me but took the time to let me know that he thought I'd be awesome at being one of them. Pan killed him.

"Still, made me start thinking there was something in me, you know? Intrinsic, that pulled them in.

"That made 'em look, and say, hey. There's a girl that could really start believing in oblivion."

Is he looking closely at her? Or away? Has to really be watching her to see the gleam of the track of a tear, or maybe two, sliding down her right cheek. "You wanna tell me about the dreams, I'll listen. I'm a Seer, and an Oracle. You know? Might be able to help you get to the bottom of it, find the tap root instead of chasing the seeds when they're cast to the wind."

Michael

He is looking closely at her. That tear and its companion don't go unnoticed. Unmentioned maybe but not unnoticed.

"I think that might be helpful," he says. "Thank you for offering."

Those tears tell him something Sera doesn't. Mike keeps it to himself for now.

"For what it's worth--" Having known her a grand total of an hour and all. "--I don't think there's anything in you that calls to them. Not any more than there is in the rest of us."

Oh. There's the leash.

Serafíne

"I know there's not," so she says, so she does not necessarily always believe, but hey. The surety of her bravado is front and foremost in her voice. The curve of her mouth beneath the reflective curve of her glasses. Something about the lilt of her chin, or the way her lean frame and long legs slide down from the spine of the couch. Bare feet on the plush carpet, quiet.

"Except for the fact that I'm hot as fuck and throw the best parties, there's not a goddamned thing. Everybody likes to have a goodtime, you know?

"Even when you're getting ready for the end of the fucking world."

--

He's found the leash. He can walk the dog. She is padding back into Her Half of the suite, fully intending to spend the next several hours soaking in the oversized tub and - then - what? God only fucking knows.

"You let me know when you're ready," is the last thing she says before she disappears back into her room.

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.