Serafíne
Late enough that the after-work crowd has
long since gotten tipsy and gone home or gotten drunk and moved on to
someplace where the drinks are cheaper and the crowd thicker, early
enough that the second shift is still humming in that golden moment
between dinner and midnight; before anyone has started putting down the
drinks that they will regret in the morning. A bit of a lull, though on
a Friday night there is never a lull in a place like Williams and
Graham.
Here is someone in the crowd, at the bar, alone for the
moment and deliberately so, though there must be someone or someones or
many someones in and around the crowd that she knows. Seated on a
barstool, one arm braced across the bar in front of her. The other
elbow planted too, her tattooed fingers near-elegant in the way they
drape over the mouth of her glass. A Long Live the Queen, frothy from the shaken-up egg white.
Protein, see. She calls it dinner.
The
impression one might have of her from behind - blond curls half-way
down her back, a skin-tight cocktail dress, legs tucked beneath the bar
and shadowed from view - is not much different from the other female
patrons on a Friday night.
But oh, the way she feels.
Ian Lai
Williams
and Graham was exactly the kind of trendy bar one might expect to find
in Denver. Modeled nostalgically after an old-fashioned speakeasy, but
with a kind of shimmer and polish that felt all-too clean and new to
really fool anyone into forgetting that they were in an upscale
establishment. The room had a lush, golden glow that set off warm,
coppery tones in the wooden furniture.
The crowd here tonight,
neither as busy as it had been or as it would be later (but still lively
for a friday evening,) was mostly a mix of young hipsters and older,
educated clientele.
And then of course, there was Serafine, who
seemed to exist in a category all her own. The Awakened were good at
that. Sera, especially, was good at that.
Ian wasn't bad at it either.
When
he walked into the room, a few people looked up. It was easy to look at
him, and easier still to keep looking once you'd started. Where Sera's
beauty was raw and visceral, Ian's was sleek and alluring. Feline.
The Sleepers noticed it without really understanding what it was they
were sensing, but Sera would know. She'd feel the predator under his
skin as surely as she'd sense the resonance (cunning and elegant)
swirling around him. He was dressed in dark selvage jeans (skinny and
tailored,) black harness boots and a crisp white t-shirt. The kind of
casual but clearly-overpriced outfit that one might expect of someone
who was probably going to be out dancing later.
Ian paused at the
far end of the bar, gazing across at where Sera was seated with her
drink. After a moment, he approached and took a seat to her left.
But
he didn't say hello. Just glanced at her and cocked an eyebrow in a wry
smile steeped in subtext. When the bartender asked what he wanted to
drink, he asked for Sazerac.
Ian Lai
[I suppose I should roll some awareness, huh?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 3 )
Serafíne
Sera wants a cigarette. Sera wants a fucking
cigarette but they don't let you smoke anywhere, anymore. So she's
sitting at the bar with her hand open over her drink and her index and
forefingers just parted as if there were indeed a clove cigarette
between them although there is not, and when Ian comes up and takes that
seat at her left, well, he has the impression of blond curls still soft
against the sharper edge of her profile. He has the background punch
of her resonance, which is impossible to miss or ignore, aswirl all
around her. Tonight she feels more like - what it is? Passageways;
thresholds. Something between or just on the verge of becoming. Liminal, like holding your tongue against the roof of your mouth, just
waiting
for something more.
Ian sits down beside her; she sees his shadow before she sees him.
The way it cuts across the bar.
Sera is aware
of him and visibly so; something about the supple flow of tension
across her skin. Something about the pattern of her breathing, the arc
of her spine. Aware of him and evidently so, but she does not look at
him for
several
long
beats
of her errant heart.
And then she does; a slanting sideglance that takes in his profile,
travels down his frame to the drink that has just been placed in front
of him. The right side of her head is shaved.
It is almost surprising, how spare her gaze is, tonight.
"I don't think we've met."
Ian Lai
"No."
He smiled again and took a sip of his drink. His tongue ran between his
lips (thoughtful, tasting.) "I can go, if you'd rather be alone." The
cast of his voice and his dark, sloped eyes gave the impression of
honesty when he said this. Maybe that was only an acknowledgment of
Sera's capabilities, or maybe it was actual courtesy. Either way, if she
wanted him to go, he would.
When Ian leaned over the bar, it
stretched the muscles in his back, coiling for a moment as he rolled his
shoulders before settling into a relaxed pose. He had a lean build,
thin but athletic. The denim fabric of his tailored jeans hugged his
legs tightly enough that you could see the outline of corded muscles in
his thighs.
(Some kind of athlete?)
"Either way, I like your dress. And your tattoos."
Serafíne
Sera
makes some noise in the back of her throat, and the slow-crawl of her
mouth is wry. One doesn't, one imagines, come to a place like this
dressed like that if one wants to be alone. But here she is; dressed
like that, drinking, and spare somehow, and alone.
She does not tell him to go.
Just
gives him that look that has the shape of a smirk though not all of its
implications. Chin hair, the long curls falling back from the sharp
tracery of her profile, her eyes half-shadowed, her mouth seamed.
Smiling, though somehow it looks like she's smiling (all smirking-wry) around something.
"Which
tattoos do you like best?" She asks, gaze sparking on his features.
Steady. And for all that sense of attenuation about her, confident as
fucking hell. She's magic, after all.
"The ones you see now? Or the ones you can't see, yet?"
Ian Lai
There
was a bit of like-minded recognition in the way that Ian's lips kept
tugging at the corners, edgy little half-smiles that never fully broke
open. Recognition because they both knew this game like it was written
into their bones. And maybe Ian had been drawn to her because they were
both Awake, but maybe it was also because he'd been around enough people
to know when someone might be worth talking to.
"Ask me again later tonight. Maybe I'll like them all."
He
took a drink of his whiskey and set the glass down, rolling it once,
lightly, between his thumb and middle finger. His eyes only strayed from
hers long enough that his attention wouldn't seem uncomfortably direct,
before alighting back on the striking angles of her face.
"I'm Ian."
Serafíne
"Most
people do," she returns, with such easy equanimity that it feels like a
statement of - well, fact. There is something quite nearly
unprepossessing about the way she says those three words, though Sera
cannot ever be truly unprepossessing. She may be the most fucking
possessing, and prepossessing, person in the goddamned bar.
But
her body language shifts slightly; doesn't it? She turns on the
barstool, unlaces her right hand from where it drifts over her drink.
The long fingers framed with tattoos. He does not get a glimpse of
sharkscissors yet; that is on the left palm, but the right has its own
ink and its own history she does not remember.
Sera is wearing a
black leather bracelet ringed with spikes and bicycle chain wrapped five
times around her right wrist by way of jewelry. A bronze ring on her
right index finger, its shield face engraved with ... well, something he
is too far to read.
"Serafíne. Call me Sera.
"New in town?"
Ian Lai
He could have made a similar claim, had he any tattoos to show (or hide.)
"Mm,
not so much new as... on the fringes." He glanced at her bracelets -
the way they stuck out (the way they moved against her skin.) His own
wrist (not the one closest to Sera but the far one - the left hand) was
decorated with a simple band made of leather and steel.
"You?"
He
took a drink while she answered, listening with measured interest. And
soon enough his angle adjusted to match hers, drawing their knees closer
together. That he wanted to touch her was more than obvious, but then,
he hadn't made any effort to hide it. Ian was young and beautiful and alone (no longer) in a bar on a Friday night. More than likely this
precise sort of interaction had been in the cards all along. If Sera had
not been here, he'd probably be drinking with someone else by now.
That didn't make his interest any less genuine, though.
[And while we're at it, let's do an empathy roll.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )
Serafíne
"No."
Sera replied, swaying slightly in his direction as she reaches to pull
her own drink - the froth from the shaken egg white has started to
collapse upon itself - closer to hand. That half-smile still curls like
smoke at the edge of her mouth, but the truth is that it does not
entirely reach her eyes. "I've been here a while."
The truth is
that Ian can see that smile and see through it; he can see also that her
interest is piqued, though it does not seem to have the same
inflections as his interest, it is still there, in her eyes and beneath
her skin.
There is also something about the way she holds
herself; a certain care, a certain guardedness, as if she were
protecting from a healing wound; as if she were a healing wound; as if
this were her first night out in a half-dozen days and she were remember
the shape of the glass in her hand and the murmur of the patrons in the
crowd and the way the music hums and the traffic outside flashes by;
the blast of warmth from the heater and the pleasure of a stranger
taking the seat beside you, is this free.
"Why stay on the fringes, though? Why not plunge the fuck in?"
Ian Lai
She
asked for elaboration, and for once, Ian gave a straight-forward answer
(and although it was not the whole answer, it was a truthful one.)
"Honestly? I work two jobs and one of them requires travel. I just... haven't had the time."
There
was a subtle shift in his energy as they spoke - a gradual thing that
softened the sharp edges of his interest. He let his drink rest a
moment, less focused on it than he was on her, and for a few beats he
sat very still. Then he moved, twisting around to face her fully, and
let the fingers of his left hand slide along the bar until they came to
rest beside her own where they gripped her glass.
"Clearly I should have, though."
And
he left it at that. Did not press to ask her to talk about whatever it
was that was still hanging onto her body - ghosts of old wounds that
might never really go away. It was as close to empathy as he usually
came. And then, if she let him, his fingers found their way to hers and
he traced a slow line up the length of her middle finger and onto the
back of her hand.
"I was going to ask if you wanted to go dancing, but... maybe another night."
Serafíne
His hand comes to rest beside her own, and
Sera's gaze falls from Ian to his hand. The scintillating glimmer of
light over the rim of her glass, the dull thread of reflection in the
beaten copper ring on her index finger. The ink worked into her skin,
black and gray and only that, narrow lines, the letters and numbers
somehow compressed and elongated by the artist such that they are both
unmistakeably scribed, and impossible to read without close
examination.
She is in a three-quarter profile to him and cuts him a slicing little glance when he makes that remark, that clearly I should have
plunged the fuck in sooner, and that makes the edge of her small smirk
deepen into something else entirely. Some remarkable sort of
knowingness that is written wholly and entirely into her skin.
Then
he touches her, and she does allow it, drops her gaze to watch him
follow that line up her middle finger to her wrist. Thinks, briefly and
wholly, of someone else entirely, and holds that thought in her body
and in her lungs and breathes out and turns her hand over so that he has
her palm, her inner wrist, the branching delicacy of her veins to
admire beneath her skin. Paler at the inner wrist than anywhere else.
"Another time. I don't know that I'm so much the going dancing sort though. I prefer a good dive bar to a goddamned nightclub.
"You seem pretty polished. You really think you can get that dirty?"
Ian Lai
He
took a certain patient appreciation in the contact of skin where his
finger met her hand, and maybe Sera would see it in the way his eyes
lingered there (in the soft-focus gleam of his gaze.) Her pattern was
alive and vivid beside him, if a bit guarded (liminal.) She asked if he
was capable of getting dirty.
"I don't get dirty," he responded.
"It's one of my gifts. My sweat smells like cinnamon and rose petals."
At that, he gave a playful loft of an eyebrow (obviously joking, though
he kept his voice dead-pan.) He lifted his hand away from hers slowly
and picked up his whiskey, finishing off the last of it in one go. There
was a brief gesture given to the bartender to indicate he was ready to
retrieve his credit card.
"Is that a challenge? Because I have to warn you, I'm not planning to go to sleep until dawn."
Serafíne
"It's
a fact," Sera, quietly. Her eyes are dark in this light and they cut
down and away from his, to some point against or just beyond the edge of
the bar. Her mouth is open, lips glossed rather than painted, her eyes
dark and rimmed with kohl, smeared at the edges a bit. There is a
peculiar light in her eyes and a certain delicacy in the way she holds
her chin, some memory like a lozenge in the center of her tongue. " -
not a challenge."
And her smile: spare and strange and quick.
The needlepoint of it, a pinprick loveliness that feels both immediate
and wrenching and distant and haloed.
"It's who I am. Not a fucking game."
And
she stands up abruptly enough that she pushes the barstool back with
her ass and if this were really an old speakeasy rather than a sleekly
modern incarnation of one the barstool would be caught on some rought
floorboard and upended, but instead it just glides.
Sera
is standing close to him; breathing in, her senses wide open, her heart
beating, beating, in her chest. Her own drink is only half-finished
but she doesn't down it, not the way you think. Not all-at-once. Not
at all. Sera's heels are insane but not quite insane enough to bring him up to Ian's full height. If he's perched on a barstool though, maybe -
"I
like the scent of sweat. Sawdust. That three a.m. panic that down's
never going to come and that five a.m. panic that it's just around the
goddamned corner. Every goddamned puzzle piece in between." "I get
dirty as hell. It doesn't sound like you'd really like that." Sera's
appreciation is never really patient, is it? Is never deliberated. It simply is. "And I don't know any other way to be."
Serafíne
Per + Awarempathy.
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Ian Lai
[Manip+Subterfuge]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 3 )
Ian Lai
It's who I am. Not a fucking game.
Ian
didn't respond to that - at least not verbally. His expression was,
like much of the rest of him, controlled. But there was an edge of...
something. Less in the details of his eyes and more in the way he
stared at her with this kind of calm, coiled focus. More feline in that
moment than she'd seen of him so far.
The sound of the barstool scraping against the floor as it was pushed back drew his gaze briefly (but only briefly.)
Sera's
energy was a burning heat beside him, the way she stood so close, a
vision of raw nerves and brutal honesty. Ian let her speak. Then he
stood, and the motion was both smooth (graceful in a way that made him
almost otherworldly) and, yes, deliberate.
Because Ian was a person who never did a single fucking thing without making damn sure that it was something he wanted to do.
And he leaned in (close enough that his breath touched the sensitive
cartilage of Sera's ear) and said, "You don't know a single fucking
thing about me."
He pocketed his credit card.
Then he left. And unless Sera made an attempt to stop him, his departure would be as smooth and silent as his entrance had been.
