Alexander Brandt
The day in Denver had been warm and
clear. The seemingly random bad weather that springs off the mountains
to the west staying away, turning it into one of those days that
promises that summer is not too far behind. But the day has passed
through evening and into night. The sun has set, the sky is clear, and
the city is cooling down.
It is the clear sky that brings
Alexander outside tonight. He’s found a blanket inside, large and thick
enough to spread out in the pasture to the side of the House. This is
where he can be found – lying on his back, staring up at the stars.
Morrison is not so far away from the city for the light pollution to be
completely absent, but far enough that more of the universe is visible
to those who would want to watch it.
So here he is. Grey
long-sleeved hoodie on over a white t-shirt, dark green combats, walking
boots. There’s an open bottle of beer sat on the grass, with the rest
of the four-pack still unopened in its packaging. A leather jacket lies
folded next to it, and an open pack of tortilla chips lies forgotten
nearby too.
It’s cold outside. But not Frozen.
Serafíne
(Who is out there? Perception plus awareness)
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 4, 7, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 1
Alexander Brandt
[Am I about to get company?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 7) ( success x 1 )
Serafíne
Tires
on the driveway. That's his primary warning that he is about to get
company. The wash of headlights over the dark sweep of rolling, open
land that surrounds the chantry proper. Someone's coming or going but
isn't someone always coming or going out here. A communal house that
houses only one or two inhabitants or an ordinary day, but there is
always someone dropping by,
and Sera felt the chill in the air
from miles and miles away, or so it seems to Dan, who is driving her
here, to whom she announced Alexander's presence way back at the turnoff
from the mainroad. She was leaning into the passenger's window of the
old white conversion van, her forehead pressed to the glass, her breath
warm enough to fog up the glass a bit, feeling everything, feeling the
road beneath the tires, feeling the sky full of light, feel the point of
contact between magic and the earth, the fount of the node. Feeling
frozen, feeling feeling feeling,
and so whilst Dan does whatever
it is that he is going to do, whatever it is that Sera brought him here
to do, Sera wanders through the house and grabs a bottle of something
and lets herself out of the glass slides and steps out of her spike
heels there and grabs them by straps with her first two fingers and -
barefoot in a short - shredded - red cocktail dress picks her way through the pasture.
It
is not late enough that the grass is damp, and the chill in the air is
bright and strangely unexpected against her skin, so Sera's shivering a
bit by the time she makes it to Alexander's side. Nudges him with the
bottle she has in hand to say hello.
Hello! says that nudge,
and the Sera, "Hey. Whatchat lookin' at. Mind company?"
Alexander Brandt
That’s
one of the things he likes about the house – its location means that it
doesn’t really get a lot of noise. So when there’s the sound of
something – an SUV, van, or something else of that size – pulls up, it’s
certainly warning that somebody is arriving. Not that it necessarily
means that company is arriving. Alexander’s been out here before when
the resonance of someone has arrived or left, without any physical
contact between them. He’d actually been hoping to catch the owner of
that defensive anger some time, but chance hadn’t brought them to the
house at the same time just yet.
It’s only when Sera steps out
from the house and heads towards the pasture that he feels her. He
doesn’t get up or look round as she walks over, already confident that
it is who he thinks. So he’s still lying on the blanket when she stops,
nudges him with the bottle. Hello! says the nudge. Hello! back says the hand patting an empty bit of blanket.
He
turns to look at Sera when she speaks, and when he replies. “Not at
all,” he says to the company. “Grab my jacket if you’re cold. I don’t
seem to mind it so much these days.” He looks back up into the sky
again. “Nothing. Everything. Just looking, really. Trying to
remember the constellations.” A few moments go by and Alexander looks
back at Sera. “How’re you doing? And how’s the ass?” He smiles as he
asks that last part, trying to make a joke of their previous meeting in
the market.
Serafíne
"Brilliant." Sera breathes
out, with a flash at Alexander's profile as she takes a seat on the
blanket, feels the grass spongy beneath the blanket bend and even break a
bit more as she sits. There is a bit of a shiver from her she's
setting her teeth against the cold and of course she's wearing almost
nothing, this slip of a dress that has been slashed through without much
consideration for what is concealed and what is revealed about her body
and, hey, without heels she is rather short but even barefoot she walks
with a swagger as if she were seven feet tall. "My ass is always
brilliant."
The truth is, Sera doesn't get the joke but she
doesn't mind it either and perhaps she does not remember that piece of
their encounter at the market the way he does. Her senses swim, oh,
lovely, and she swims within them and she is cold she realizes then so she does
take his jacket. Shakes it out and drapes it over her shoulders and
brings her own bottle - larger than his, wine or whiskey, perhaps -
between her legs.
Bare feet flat on the blanket, on the grassy field.
"I don't know the names of any fucking constellations. What ones do you remember?"
Head tipped back as she considers the stars.
Alexander Brandt
Alexander
watches Sera as she sits, looking at her striking profile. Not from
lust or any thoughts of romance. More to get a better look at the woman
who always seems so sure of herself, who he doesn’t actually know all
that much about. He pushes himself up a little, resting on his elbows,
then holds out the beer bottle. “Cheers.” He takes a swig and then
puts the bottle back on the grass.
“A few. That one up there, the
three stars close together in a line?“ Alexander points up at the
sky. “That’s Orion’s Belt. There are others that make up the rest of
him and his bow, but I can’t remember which.” He moves his arm,
pointing elsewhere in the sky. “That’s the Big Dipper, the group of
seven. Looks like a cooking pot with a bent handle. And that bright
one up there,” he points elsewhere again,” is the North Star. Favoured
by sailors and people who have broken their compass.”
He lies back
on the blanket again. “I was told once that it’s almost like looking
back in time. We’re seeing those stars as they were hundreds of years
ago. They might not even be there anymore.”
Serafíne
Sera
takes a long-swig of whatever-it-is she brought out with her and leans
back to look up as Alexander points out the most recognizable pieces of
the constellations he remembers. Orion's belt receives a hmmm from her,
recognition stitched into the timbre of her voice. Of the name or the
stars or the line they define so sharply in the night sky. Once she
sees the belt she recognizes the rest of Orion - who is so recognizeable
- and it takes her a moment or two to pull herself away and then
re-orient on the Big Dipper, and the North Star.
Favored by sailors
Alexander informs her and that makes Sera remember another conversation
she had once not far from here: a different night, a different season,
the world still as it always is, framed by light. Now and then and
never and will be all wrapped together at once.
"Time's just
another fiction," Sera tells him, giving him a slanting glance as he
remarks on how old the light of the stars actually is. "Everything is.
Everything's just - "
And she breathes in, takes another swig,
then flops back on the blanket as well, one arm crooked beneath the back
of her head, the other on her bottle.
"You're figuring out how
it works, right?" she asks him then, still looking at the stars. "For
you? It's different for everyone."
Magic, she means. Of course she does.
Alexander Brandt
Sera
might feel the move of the blanket as Alexander shrugs. A few moments
pass as he thinks. Or, perhaps, doesn’t think but waits for
inspiration. Those moments pass. “Yes. No. Both.” He looks back at
Orion’s Belt, trying to make out the rest of the figure. “In general,
yes. Right now, I don’t know. Maybe. I just used to do this as a
kid. The looking at the stars? I always loved being outdoors. Still
do.”
It’s not really much of an answer to her question, but it’s
all he really has at the moment. It’s not like he’s been here for hours
meditating on life’s great mysteries. Not that that’s how he’d have
thought about it even if he had. He’s just been... here. Not really
thinking about much of anything, which is as close to meditating as he
gets.
He goes quiet again for a little while before asking, “How
long have you been Awake for? Did you know what was going on when it
happened?”
Serafíne
Yes. No. I don't know. Maybe.
Somehow
altogether these add up to just the right answer and the shadow of it
makes Sera grin, quietly in the darkness. She hums, too, beneath her
breath or beneath her skin and cannot really drink from that bottle
while she's laying back and looking at the stars so she tips her chin up
for a quick swig, but mostly ignores the damned thing.
Quiet's okay. Quiet's fine.
Alexander's quiet and not really thinking about anything and really does Sera ever
just think about anything? She must be just feeling: the brilliance of
the sky, the cushion of the crushed grass beneath them. The chill in
the air and the fading memory of warmth in the ground. The points of
departure: where night becomes day and spring becomes summer, these
places between all around them.
He asks what he asks her
and she does think about it then. Holds that too against her tongue, in
her throat, the idea-of-it, the knowledge beneath, and considers what
she will say and how she will say it. Whether she will say it at all.
But -
"I don't really remember waking up." Sera tells Alex, or
perhaps confesses. Listen, she is quiet. This is an old fear and an
old wound. "I'm pretty sure it was gradual, though, not all-at-once
like it was for you. Wrapped up with a whole bunch of other shit, so
I'm not sure I knew it was happening."
A beat.
"I'm twenty-four now, so. Six years? Seven, maybe."
Alexander Brandt
I don’t know.
He’s no stranger to not knowing, but Alexander seems to be saying that
an awful lot more these days. And not just about this new, brighter
view of life that he’s woken up to. How are you? What happened? What are you going to do? The answers are slowly coming, but the questions seem to come so much faster. Sera feels. Alexander does. Not always the smartest thing, but usually something.
What
he does now is listen. He’s good at that. Partly because it’s a good
way to find stuff out from, and about, people. But the bigger part
because he generally cares about people too. Alexander turns his head
to look at Sera again while she speaks, quieter than usual. Asks, “did
you have someone helping you figure it all out?”
A beat of his
own. “You seem so much older sometimes. I don’t mean you look old or
anything. Just... your mind or your spirit, I guess. It seems older
than your body.” He looks up at the stars again, wondering if that
actually made much sense.
Serafíne
"We're all older than our bodies."
Oh
how she's fooled him, Sera. He hasn't seen her breaking down, broken
down. He hasn't seen her crying, or shaking, or on her knees in his
bathroom at 4 a.m. puking her guts out. He hasn't seen her as anything
but someone who knows what the fuck is going on, which is also Sera, and
also true.
"Our avatars. Our souls. Whatever the fuck it is
that helps us connect with the universe and open our fucking eyes.
We've been here before. We'll come back again, maybe.
"Different, but - "
Oh,
she feels in that moment connected to everything. Neat little stitches
drawn with a neat little hand through the stuff of her skin. Finely
wrought, beautifully made. Her shoulderblades against the blanket over
the grass, her hair arrayed around her head like a halo. Knees bent,
bare feet flat, heels empty beside her left hip.
"I had someone. Yeah. I don't really remember her either. I know her name, though.
"Claire."
--
"You are gonna figure this all out, you know."
Ian Lai
[Awareness?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 5, 5, 9) ( success x 1 )
Ian LaiIt
was a quiet night at the chantry. Alexander and Serafine were out in
the pasture, looking at the stars, and perhaps the presence of a third
party might not be a welcome interruption (particularly given the nature
of Alexander and Ian's previous encounter.) But as they spoke, the
headlights of Ian's Audi cast a white glow over the ground as he pulled
into the driveway behind Sera's Jeep. His engine idled for a moment
before going quiet.
When Ian left the car, he stopped to look out
over the darkened landscape, and a subtle wisp of combined resonance
drew his eyes toward to pasture, and the two shadowed figured seated
there. Ian watched them for a moment, giving his keys a little spin
around his finger before pocketing them. Then he began to make his way
across the lawn, ducking between the wooden slats in the open fence as
he crossed into the pasture.
"No boots tonight?" he asked of Sera, offering a light smile if she happened to look in his direction.
Alexander Brandt
She
was the one to find Alexander when he was convinced he was mad, ready
to fling himself into oblivion. She was so sure when they were pulled
into the Umbra by a sending. So he is... fooled? Does that imply
deception? Mistaken then? Or maybe she is only as human as everyone
else, and Alexander is yet to see her on a bad day. When that day
comes? Well, she was there for him. So where else is he going to be?
“I
didn’t know that. That the Avatars crossed lifetimes, I mean. How
does that work, then? What happens to it when somebody dies?” Or to
the spirit, for that matter. Now that he knows there is a spirit, that
there is some kind of afterlife... What happens after?
Another
look Sera’s direction as he says, “Claire. Could you find her? If you
wanted to, I mean.” He knows there’s history he doesn’t know – and
maybe she doesn’t know either – so would that even be something she
wants to do?
The sound of the car goes relatively un-noticed. But
the approaching resonance, familiar from the park not so long ago?
Alexander rolls his eyes and sighs, not in the mood for games. He sits
back up to rest on his elbows and looks towards the new arrival.
Serafne
Sera
shrugs quietly, still sprawled back, her hand splayed open beneath her
skull, and there is a kind of surrender in the shrug, though she is as
assured in her not-knowing as she is in her knowing.
"Fuck if I
know - " and he can hear the half-smile soldered into the words, which
in turn threads itself into this supple crescent of a grin as she turns
her head and casts a lashed glance at his profile. Dark against the
darkness, but distinct, see? A different sort of breathing shadow.
She
means, it too. To all of that. Fuck if she knows how Avatars work,
fuck if she knows what happens when we die, fuck if she knows what comes
next or what came before or where we go when we dream, just that those
things happen and each of us is our own sort of universe, this endlessly
recursive series of worlds, and she is who and what she is, and she
loves that,
loves that,
loves that.
"Might be some
books in the library if you want to research it, though. Or you could
ask one of the Hermetics. They usually like to read."
This brief, supple grin engages her quick mouth, hidden in the darkness.
"Some of them like to talk, too. And Claire?"
A shake of her head.
"Naw. I'm pretty sure she's dead."
--
Sera's
senses are blown wide open tonight. She could feel Ian a half-mile
away. A mile. Miles and miles, maybe, peripheral, like a satellite
slowly spiraling back to earth at the edges of her awareness, then
closer and closer to the center, and then he's here and he comments on
her lack-of-boots and she lifts one long, bare leg to show him no, no,
no boots tonight.
"Barefoot."
Barelegged too though her heels are on the blanket beside her and she is wearing a remarkably tiny red dress that covers just enough to avoid an indecency charge.
"Do you guys know each other?"
Ian Lai
Neither
the sigh nor the roll of Alexander's eyes went unnoticed by Ian, but he
didn't offer any particular reaction. Instead he regarded the pair
thoughtfully, as though he wasn't entirely sure yet whether he intended
to stay or to merely offer a quick greeting. When Sera lifted her leg to
show off her bare feet, Ian let his eyes trail from the tip of her
pointed toes to the hem of her dress, admiring the way the moon and
starlight highlighted the shape of her leg.
"It's a good look on you."
Did
he and Alexander know each other? Ian crouched down in the grass,
leaving the blanket for its two original occupants, and perched there on
the balls of his feet, dipping a hand down to splay his fingers in the
grass. The ground beneath it was cold to the touch.
"Not really. We ran into each other once."
He didn't elaborate any further.
Alexander Brandt
Alexander
was about to say that he’d ask the Hermetics that he knew, even though
what little he knew of the Dreamspeakers and Euthanatos made them more
likely to be able to answer his questions. But Ian is there, and the
conversation changes onto a different track.
Alexander looks at
the other man for a few moments. “Yeah, we’ve met.” His tone isn’t
particularly warm. But he seems to make a choice and shuffles round on
the blanket a little, bending his legs to make some space for the
newcomer – if he wants it. “There’s beer if you want some,” he says,
nodding towards the three remaining bottles. Alexadner isn’t going
anywhere, at least not yet. And that meeting certainly wasn’t the worst
first encounter with Mage-kind. He’s open to seeing what happens.
Serafíne
See? Alexander already knows more about how to figure shit out
than Sera does or perhaps ever will. Hermetics have books and read
them like whoa; therefore, ask them any factual question you might have
and proceed to more or less ignore their answers because who the fuck
cares is perhaps her philosophy of research.
And Ian's
admiring the shape of her leg in the starlight and Sera's enjoying
stretching the muscles, the balance of leverage, the pointed curl of her
toes, and Alexander makes room on the blanket but Sera herself does not
really think of that. She just makes a noise in the back of her throat
and drops her leg after a time and plants both feet on the ground,
flat, knees bent, the cocktail stress just covering her hips, still
holding her bottle with one hand and cradling her blond head with the
other.
"Every looks a good look on me," Sera informs Ian with a
quick flash of her teeth in the darkness. "Even better off." The last
delivered with a laugh that becomes open mouthed.
"We were just talking about the stars," Sera informs Ian. "How many constellations can you pick out?"
Ian Lai
Alexander
shifted on the blanket, and Ian glanced at him for a long, silent
moment. It wasn't entirely clear what he was thinking (Ian could be
difficult to read even in the daylight,) but eventually he seemed to
decide to stick around for a while, because he stood up and walked over
to the open patch of blanket. After lowering himself onto it, he
stretched his legs out into the grass, crossing them at the ankle, and
lay back with his head on Sera's legs. If she seemed to mind his
presence there, he'd move. Otherwise, he'd raise an arm and fold it
underneath his head, letting his fingers graze the skin on Sera's calf.
Ian
had on a white t-shirt underneath a light leather jacket. When he
stretched out, the hem of the t-shirt rode up a little on his stomach,
but he didn't seem to mind when the chilled breeze touched his skin.
"Maybe later," he answered when Alex offered him a beer.
Sera asked him how many constellations he could pick out.
"I
don't really know astronomy. The dippers, I guess." (Everyone knew
those.) "Someone showed me Scorpio once, but I don't think I remember
it."
Alexander Brandt
Ignore what they say or,
depending on the Hermetic, have trouble taking it all in and remembering
it later. Some woman having visions on a mountain got together with a
few other mages to create what would turn into the Traditions? Wasn’t
that the basic gist of how the cool kids got together for survival?
Alexander
shuffles again, booted feet flat on the ground with his knees up. He
takes a last swig from the beer bottle, draining it dry, before lying
back on the blanket again. “We could make our own up. Like looking for
the shapes in clouds, just with the stars instead. There’s...” he
turns his head round, squints a little, points to a random patch of
sky. He smiles when he finishes the sentence, “Hera’s handbag.” The
smile fades a little as he lifts his head to look towards the other
man. “I’m Alexander, by the way.”
Serafíne
Here
is a noise for Alexander, all back of the throat and bemused, the sort
that lingers there and thrums beneath her skin and reminds her of the
way hearts and mouths work, and god knows what-all-else. But listen:
Alexander names Hera's purse and Sera breathes out through her nostrils
this silent sort-of-laugh and Ian's stretched out now with his head
resting on her legs and Sera is surprised by this but she is
also: look and languid and she requires contact the way most people
require oxygen and therefore, she does not shake him off. Just lifts
her chin a bit to glance down the line of her body at him, starlight
flashing across the surface of her dark eyes.
That look lasts just for a moment then her head is tipped back again.
"That
one looks like a ballerina balancing on a rhino's horn," Sera proposes
to Alexander, pointing at something in the sky that could be a star or
maybe a satellite and certainly bears no resemblance to a ballerina
balancing on a rhino's horn so either she's hallucinating or she's
making a joke.
Then Alexander is introducing himself and Sera finds herself saying, to Ian,
"Alexander's awesome." Which is: true, although she doesn't know why she's saying it.
Ian Lai
Ian actually laughed a little at Alexander's suggestion, giving a light exhale. "Ian."
There.
Now they'd met (officially.) And they'd actually managed to exchange a
few words without lacing them with barbs or hidden meaning. Whatever was
the world coming to? Perhaps it was Sera's presence that changed the
dynamic, or maybe Alex was just a decent guy willing to give a relative
stranger a second chance.
Sera imagined that she saw a ballerina,
and perhaps she meant something by it (Ian didn't know how much of their
encounter in the park she actually remembered,) or perhaps she said it
without really making the connection. Either way, Ian didn't seem to
care. He lifted his free arm and pointed at a spot in the sky.
"That's clearly a bunch of centaurs having an orgy."
Sera thought that Alexander was awesome. And Ian? Just smiled, all wry and one-sided, and abstained from comment.
Alexander Brandt
Alexander
nods to Ian in greeting as they exchange names and relaxes a little.
Perhaps Alexander is a decent guy, and maybe he reacts better when he
doesn’t feel like he’s being played with by a complete stranger. Either
way, he’s comfortable and had no urge to run off and leave the others
behind. Again.
The suggestions from the others get him laughing,
strangely without feeling like he has to hold anything back. There’s no
imminent disaster, no bruised feelings, no floundering out of his depth
or awkwardness at being the clueless new guy who barely knows enough to
keep himself out of trouble. Who cares about baggage from the past, or
the great unknowns of the future? For now, at least. Come the next
disaster, mystery, other weirdness, or maybe even the next morning?
They may well come back. But for now he’s feeling the happiest he has
in a while.
The smile comes across in Alexander’s tone as he
speaks. “That is not centaurs having an orgy. That is definitely a
group of nuns riding a carousel.” He reaches for the tortilla chips and
nudges the other two Mages with the bag, offering them.
Serafíne
Sera makes a noise when Ian suggests centaurs
having an orgy. Bless Sister Mary Peter, who was her Antiquities
instructor before Sera was kicked out of boarding school for being,
essentially, a Sera, because Sera does know myths. Or myth. Some
myths anyway: those hoary old Greeks, all the betrayal and infighting,
all the incest and secrecy.
"Don't you mean satyrs?" she asks Ian when he proposes centaurs,
nudging him a bit with her knee or her thigh, lifting her head to take a
swig from whatever the fuck is in that bottle, then dropping it back
again.
"Anyway, why don't we split the difference and call it a group of nuns having an orgy on a carousel?"
Ian Lai
Alexander
was happier than he'd been in a long time, but Ian didn't have any
frame of reference to understand what the moment meant to him. Neither
was he fully aware of the degree to which Alexander had interpreted
their last encounter as manipulative. Ian himself likely wouldn't have
described it that way, but since his intentions remained difficult to
parse, the only interpretation Alex had to work with was his own. It was
a fair guess that the two of them might never be the best of friends,
but for the moment at least, that night seemed a distant thing.
Sera
found a way to combine the two constellations, and Ian grinned, his
teeth gleaming like ivory in the darkness. "I like the way you play this
game."
And he tilted his head to look up at her, offering some
sort of silent exchange. (Like he was asking for permission to do...
something.) Beneath his head, he let his fingers brush slow strokes
along her skin.
Evidently the fact that Alex was sitting right beside them was not much of a deterrent from flirting.
Serafíne
Per + Awareness as empathy: look?
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 7, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )
Alexander Brandt
“Yeah,
that works,” Alexander adds, still smiling. His presence may not be
any deterrent against flirting but, then, it’s been subtle enough so far
that it hasn’t made him feel awkwardly in the way and find a reason to
leave. “Might need a less obvious name, though. Sister Mary’s
Pleasure, or something like that?” Because aren’t all good nuns called
Mary?
While he has no urge to run away, a certain urge to run to
something has been building for a little while. Between the beer and
the cold, it’s starting to become rather insistent. “I’ll be right
back,” he says to the others as he rolls round onto his knees and
stands. “Call of nature. And not the clawed furry kind. You guys want
anything from inside?” He waits for the answers from the two still on
the blanket before heading in to find the bathroom.
Ian Lai
Perhaps
in his attempt to communicate, Ian reveals more than he'd intended. He
is tired. Not physically, but emotionally. Tired and worn around the
edges, and something in the wanting of his gaze suggests a deep desire
in him to just... let these things go. To forget. To be something else
for a while. Something he knows. Something he is good at.
He
thinks Sera is beautiful. He hasn't exactly hidden that fact. For all
that she is a very different sort of creature than him. For all that
he's seen her in some of her less flattering moments. She has something
primal and honest that he wants to surround himself with. Something
bright and vibrant enough to chase everything else away.
See, he
doesn't care that Alex is there. He might very well start hitting on
Alex, too, were it not for the fact that Alex was leaving.
In the
most basic terms: He wants a distraction. He wants to get laid. But
right now he's just asking if he can touch her. Kiss her maybe. More
than what he's doing now.
Serafíne
Sera breathes
out sharply as Alexander takes his leave. Maybe there was a laugh
beneath her breath for the joke-within-a-joke. Maybe there was
something else in the way she watches him, as he pushes himself to his
feet and rises to head (briefly) inside. Leaves the blanket and the
other mages behind though. The four remaining beers from the six pack
and Sera with her wine-or-whiskey and the night sky and the renamed
constellations and the cool night air, and Sera -
- rises to her
elbows and shakes out her (dyed) blond curls and looks down the line of
her body at Ian. Her gaze is both slanted and shadowed but she is such
an open creature, there is no deception in her. Nothing close to it,
although sometimes the wick and the moonlight conspire to create
something like it, some illusion of a veil.
That is how she
remains for a rather long moment: quiet, see, her mouth not precisely
pursed, watching Ian as he touches her, as he strokes her skin in a way
that is really rather intimate for all that they are virtual strangers.
This slidingly astute look, this quiet hum of awareness that skims and -
here and there - dives below the superficial mystery of a stranger.
"I didn't know we were playing a game. I sure as hell don't know the fucking rules. If I did, I'd probably break them."
She
picks up her bottle: another swig, the whiskey (see: it is whiskey, not
wine) burns and brings tears to her eyes. Sera doesn't mind.
Alexander is retreating toward the house, they can still hear his
footsteps on the grass.
It is the exhaustion that touches her,
above all else. Her voice is quiet when she tells him, quietly. "You
can kiss me if you want."
Ian Lai
[Empathy, because permission and reciprocation are two very different things]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 3 )
Serafíne
There
is always Want in Sera. Sera is a creature of Want and now is no
different. Touch her the way he is touching her leg, the soft slow
strokes, and she is so exquisitely responsive to that touch. The
overriding beat in her right now, though, is empathy, a kind of shunted
ache for Ian mixed with sort of sublingual surprise that he is not all
slick surface. She would like to kiss him; she wants to inhale that
emotional exhaustion straight from his body, see? but there is also an
ambivalence about her that is a bit hard to parse because he knows so
little about her, and in many ways, she knows so little about her self.
And
around or beneath that ambivalence, he can sense that even if they do
make out, he is probably not going to get laid tonight. At least not
out here, on the blanket in the shadow of the chantry beneath the stars.
Ian Lai
"No
thanks," Ian replied lightly to Alex's request, glancing over at him as
he stood up to leave. He probably wouldn't be gone long, but as he
walked away the air grew still, and it became easy to forget that there
were yet other people nearby.
(No, not easy to forget. They were
there. You could feel them. But it seemed less important, somehow. To
Ian, at least. Or maybe he'd never really cared to begin with.)
He'd
meant the constellations, when he'd used the word 'game.' Now though?
See that look in his eyes? Even in the dark, it was clear. More honest
and direct than he almost ever was.
This was not a game to him.
And
in the depths of it somewhere, perhaps Sera would see the flickers of
something a little dark and feral that lived under the sleek surface of
his skin. It was the same thing that had made him recoil from Kalen's
attempts to provide comfort. The same thing that had led him down all
manner of self-destructive paths in his younger days. See, not every
part of him was clean. Not by a long shot.
In that moment, they
didn't want the same thing. But they could have something, at least. So
Ian turned his head and pressed his mouth to the place where his hand
had been, closing his eyes as he kissed her leg. Then he unfolded his
arm and sat up. But there was no rush. His energy was still and quiet.
"I'm not what you think I am."
He was, and he wasn't. It was a complicated answer.
"When I came out here, I was going to ask if you could let me into the library."
Maybe it was the stars. They did funny things to people.
He leaned forward and pressed another kiss to her temple, pausing there to let a gust of warm breath wash over her skin.
But he did not kiss her mouth.
"Maybe we should do that."
And he retreated then, pushing himself to his feet and holding a hand out to help her up, if she needed it.
Serafíne
Sera
watches Ian quietly as he turns to press his mouth to her bare calf, or
perhaps her thigh. Her skin is cool and the night is cold and faint
little pinprick goosebumps scatter where his warm mouth touches her
skin. She does not move, though, and there is a sort of grandeur in her
stillness, the settled surety one expects from a priestess or a
goddess. Then he rises, shift his weight, turns his body to lean up and
press another kiss to her temple and here Sera closes her eyes. Her
breath catches, and she cuts a brief glance all shunting-away, then
back, lifting her chin to follow the track of his moon-and-starshadows
across her lean frame.
He tells her, then, that he isn't what she thinks he is.
She makes a noise in the back of her throat, which sounds like assent, or at least like that's fair.
"I wonder what you think I am."
Sera murmurs as she reaches out to take his hand, allowing herself to be pulled upright.
"But sure. Alright, c'mon. Follow me, I'll let you in."
