Serafíne
The hallways are packed and there are those
half-affected, half-assured girlish sort of screams coming from the
mini-haunted house, drowned in turn by the thumping bass. The crowd is
intense, packed tight on the dance floor, this horseshoe shaped bar
besieged by drunk, sweaty mermaids, pirates, sexy cthulus and every
iteration of be something else tonight someone might imagine.
Zombie acrobats in stylized Victorian corsets with tiny tophats and
light-up tutus swing high above the crowd on trapezes rigged to the
ceiling and on the main stage, a pair of stunt performers play with
fire.
Seraf ne is out there somewhere in the crowd and in a
place like this, on a night like this where every single guest is intent
on letting loose, on shaking themselves free of every single ordinary
thing in their day to day lives, she has a particular sort of
centripetal gravity about her - though otherwise isn't she just another
girl in a revealing costume, throwing back shots and making out with
strangers, because they aren't really strangers, because she loves to
feel them as their strange little shells start to crack open.
Fuck,
everyone's half-naked here. Her bodysuit is absolutely sheer, except
where the golden skeleton skims her body. Her hair is threaded with
gold too, piled high, twisted through with chains and braids even actual
gold leaf to match the couture piece she wears and she came tonight
wearing a pair of golden-caged platform heels you see but she has traded
them for the amazing lighted hula hoop she is holding onehanded
above her head because her other hand is holding a bottle of Veuve
Cliquot which, gauche as it may be, she drinks directly from the mouth
of the bottle.
Why the fuck not?
The night has just begun. Best celebrate.
Ian
[Bodies in Motion (Life 1/Forces 1) diff 4 -1 (resonance)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Ian
[Awareness]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )
Ian
[Ian how hot do you look tonight? (I dunno man I want to roll App ONCE before he dies)]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 6 )
Ian
[Dancing! Dex+Performance -1 diff from that rote]
Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 10 ) Re-rolls: 1 [WP]
Ian
Some
of them were there to celebrate. Some were there to be someone (or
something) other than who they were. But Ian was not at the Paranormal
Palace to become something new. They were already extraordinary
creatures, Ian and Sera. What need did they have for masks on the one
night of the year when anyone could be anything?
Sera had
never seen Ian perfectly in his element before. The room was smoky and
filled with a thudding, pulsing bass from the music and the lighting was
shadows and deep color, blending from one shade to the next. And there
were people performing with fire and for some the night was early yet
but... Ian wasn't here to hang out at the bar and make small-talk.
People dealt with trauma in all kinds of ways, and Ian usually found
some way to purge the wild, destructive emotions from his system. When
he was a kid, he'd done that in a lot of dangerous ways. Now he mostly
did it by finding places like these and dancing until his heart felt
like it might give out.
Which is what he was doing right now.
His
costume was less a costume than it was an impression. He was shirtless,
with body paint decorating his back and shoulders and arms. Whoever had
done it must have been an actual artist, because the impression of fur
was surprisingly realistic. Orange and white with black tiger stripes.
The paint had a very faint sheen of glitter that caught the light now
and then. There was paint on his face too, but not much. Just an elegant
brush of color and dark liner around his eyes. Again, reminiscent of a
tiger's markings. There were glittering black claw rings on each of his
fingers, and if one happened to look closely at his teeth, they'd notice
small caps on his canines. Just enough to give them a bit more length
and sharpness. They looked professional, like his makeup.
(A little on the nose tonight, Ian? Maybe that was the point.)
Oh,
and he was barefoot. Which for anyone else might have been dangerous
with this crowd, but Ian seemed to have a knack for avoiding getting his
toes tread on by less graceful dancers. His pants were coated black
denim, cut slim with a slight taper. They sat low on his hips. Some of
the people near him seemed to appreciate that. The ones who were paying
attention, anyway.
He was dancing, and he looked. fucking.
amazing. Like a force of nature. Primal and wild and hungry and so
impossibly graceful. Sera was at the bar in her barely-there couture
drinking champagne from the bottle and once, Ian swung around and opened
his eyes and looked at her. He had on golden contacts and when he
smiled his teeth looked sharp and dangerous. There was just that - this
flash of acknowledgement. Then he let himself get swept into the music
again.
Serafíne
The bottle she lifts upward in
response or is that the lighted hula-hoop? She has two hands,
Seraf ne, and both are part of the far-flung galaxy of her body but she
does not quite remember how to work one independent from the other, or
which is which, or why there are two. This ache in her lungs
that makes her feel both expansive and contracted, so very precisely in
this place and time that each breath she takes feels like has defined a
whole new universe.
But listen: Ian flashes her that look and
she lifts both her slender arms overhead and a person who is not a
stranger wraps her arms around Sera from behind and Sera half-folds into
her, breathing, breathing, see. Turns her golden head to catch the
edge of whatever said someone is saying to her and catches sight of Ian
again. Across the crowd. Dancing, you know, as if the word had been invented simply to describe what he's doing in just that moment.
This
time her gaze snags on Ian, Ian in his painted attire, Ian too
on-the-nose with his contacts and his claw-rings and his sharpened
teeth. Ian in his element.
This time,
she watches,
and watches,
and watches.
Serafíne
(Per + Awareness-as-empathy)
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 3, 3, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 3 )
Ian
What
was Ian feeling in that moment? He could have hidden it, sure. But
doing so would have made him... less. Less beautiful. Less wild.
Performers knew how to channel their instincts. It's what made Ian's
dancing more than just skill and elegance. It's what made him fit so
perfectly into that moment and into that costume that was less a costume
and more an elaboration of his nature. Like wearing his skeleton on the
outside of his skin.
(See, he and Sera hadn't had all-that-dissimilar ideas.)
He
danced the way that he felt. Like he wanted to grow claws and sink his
teeth into someone's skin. He felt aggressive and hungry and a little
unstable. A mood that could easily turn dark with the wrong push, but
that just now was balancing on the edge of primal release. And he wanted
to be near people. He wanted to smell their sweat and taste their
pheromones and be overwhelmed and buried by a thousand beating hearts.
He wanted to not think. To be in the moment, as Sera was.
Shadows of a terrible place and terrible brutality still lingered on him. This is how he purged those shadows.
Sera
watched, and watched. And Ian felt her eyes on him but he didn't stop
to look at her again. Not when there were people all around him and
there was one girl dressed as some kind of faerie who actually wasn't a
bad dancer and she seemed very interested in him, so he let
himself drift into her for a moment. Let his lips graze her ear before
he pulled away and lost himself in the crowd again.
Serafíne
Her
attention is a quick thing. Alive in its own way, with a measure and a
pulse and a heartbeat all its own, even when she's rolling, as she is
tonight. Even when she is fucked up and slitheringly alive, and so it
is tonight. Sera watches Ian dance for three four five heartbeats and
those heartbeats turn to measures and those measures turn to something
else for which she has no name, but which is bounded and framed by the
pulsing lights and the beats and the shadows of spent flame from the
front stage. Or perhaps merely the shadows framing Ian,
and
then he finds that girl in the crowd, lovely enough and liquid enough
and lively enough to complement him as he undoes the many layers of
tightly framed masks behind which he spends so much of his waking life.
And Sera - she smiles this hooked little smile that is mostly to-herself, you understand, and she lets him go.
See?
It's like catch-and-release. She is aware of him in the crowd, the way
he slices through it like a swordfish through deep waters, the silver
flash of his belly against the lights, but for all that she lets him,
you know, Be.
Maybe he feels her resonance as she slides from the bar and joins the crowd, radial around him, but he's not looking for her, he's not looking
for anything except the waves of strangers all around him and she's so
fucking short that when she slides into the crowd, even half-way to
naked as she is, she all but disappears.
Here now yes, and in
the crowd, but then farther away. Upstairs maybe, through the warren
of dark corridors that serve as the mini haunted house. Just like that
see - like a spoke in a wheel, revolving.
Ian
They
passed each other by. Or rather, Sera passed him by. Because they were
each in their moment and sometimes moments did not need to intersect.
Sometimes it was enough for them to graze past each other in the night.
So:
time passed. Sera went upstairs and Ian kept dancing and at some point
that dancing became as much about contact as it did movement. Ian tried
to be careful of all the sharp points on his teeth and his fingers, but
he left a few scratches in his wake. No one complained. It was Halloween
and they were drunk or high or just wild with energy and the music was
low and thrumming and dark and frankly most of them liked it. The
sharpness. The little pricks of pain when he grazed their skin with his
teeth. He liked it too when they did it to him. He would have liked
more.
He wasn't exactly tired by the time he left the dance
floor, but the rush of his blood was less wild and immediate. It was...
what, an hour later? Maybe more. He hadn't been keeping track of the
time, and unlike Sera, that wasn't something that necessarily came
naturally to him. First it was because he needed to drink something. So
he claimed a bottle of water at the bar and downed most of it quickly
while the music and the lights continued to play in the background. The
rest he finished up as he made his way up the stairs.
This was an intermission. He may as well explore while he was at it.
Sooner
or later his path took him past the couch pit that Sera had rented.
Past the press of bodies that joined her there. Almost he kept going,
but then he stopped and looked - the way she had done with him. And
slowly he padded forward until he came to stop beside Sera.
"Nice costume."
Serafíne
The
champagne bottle is long gone. She has something else near to hand or
maybe a half-dozen other options close to hands and none of them is
water and she is reclining on the spine of one of those couches like,
you know, some sort of languid deity and the complicated architecture of
her hair has become unmoored and there is a trio of strangers standing
on the table in the center of the couch pit (a zombie, Elmo, and a
sexy/creepy baby doll) dancing even though there's no music out here, or
rather: not much music, and all of it subdural, heard the way elephants
hear those deep, deep tones we never new they could make, with the body
rather than mind, and from very very far away.
She's smiling
at them elbow crooked, temple in the palm of her head, her free arm
wrapped loosely around a stranger's neck, mouth hovering just over the
crown of her red-gold hair when -
- Ian stops, and Ian speaks,
and Sera flops backwards and favors him with this half-private smile,
so winsome and genuine it might be heartbreaking if one had a heart one
wanted broken. Her pupils are huge. There is nothing natural about
that.
And she reaches out both hands to him, palms up and wordless. She expects him to take them.
Ian
Ian was careful about the way he took Sera's
hands. Careful because tonight his fingers had claws on them. They were
relatively short, but the tips were just sharp enough not to be terribly
comfortable (unless one liked being scratched.) So he was careful, but
Sera would still feel the light press of metal points against her skin
as Ian climbed down onto the sofa. The atmosphere here was different
than it was on the dance floor. Up here the music was little more than a
low echo, and everyone looked as languid and high as Sera did.
Ian
settled against the cushions with both knees bent and let his eyes
glance toward the dancers. He was sweating, and he swiped his hand up
over his forehead to catch some of it, running clawed fingers through
his hair.
"Happy Halloween," he offered in a dry tone.
He did not bring up their last encounter. What they'd done. What they'd seen. Neither of them were in the right place for it.
Serafíne
Oh!
Sera is both surprised and pleased that Ian takes her hands and takes
them with care and yet there is also a kind of perfect equanimity about
her in that moment. She's still laying down as he climbs over her and
draws her shoulder blades together kind of arching her spine and smiling
up at him - lips pressed together even as the corners of her mouth are
all curving wide. And she doesn't understand that he has claws, she
thinks that he must be so careful because he is delicate, because he is
fastidious, but she also remembers the edge about him as she watched him
dance, how singular it made him seem to her.
How alone.
--
Maybe he likes that.
But
here he is and he climbs over her and settles on the couch and she lets
him go when both legs have swung over her body and he's hoping down
into the little couch pit, sweating and drinking - what the fuck?
something clear that Sera assuredly hopes is vodka or something reasonable
what are you a Puritan, Ian? - and he says nothing about the last time
they saw each other, and she says nothing about it either.
She looks better, doesn't she?
She looks - quite simple - happy
and she's rolling over onto her side, propping her head up with her
right arm and reaching out to slide her left hand through Ian's hair.
It looks like water in the moving lights.
Like dark, dark water.
Poor redhead, she's right there and somehow she's already been forgotten.
Sera
leans closer to Ian, maybe she doesn't hear the dryness in his tone.
Maybe she does. Maybe this is what it calls for. "I missed Halloween
last year," she murmurs, confides, from behind him, her mouth close to
his ear. "So this time I'm gonna celebrate. I already got to be a cheeseburger. I have this sweater."
Ian
This
is what Sera has come to symbolize for Ian. She could be dressed like a
naked skeleton, all sheer skin and gold filament. Or she could be
dressed like a cheeseburger. She was so much a creature of whim that
very little about her would have surprised him at this point.
Sera
hoped that his water was vodka. It was not. And in fact, he finished it
off now, tipping back his head to down the remainder of its contents in
a few deep gulps that made the muscles in his throat roll fluidly. Sera
touched his hair. Ran her fingers through it. Ian's hair was dark and
soft and coated in a thin layer of some kind of hair product that kept
it styled loosely and smelling a bit like sweet citrus.
Sera
may have forgotten the red-head, but Ian did not. He glanced at her and
smiled lightly, one side of his lips upturned as he set the empty water
bottle down somewhere nearby.
He didn't protest Sera's hand in
his hair, but he did roll his head back to look at her. The makeup
around his eyes was actually quite striking. Unless he had a secret
talent for makeup artistry (which, who knows, he might) he'd probably
paid someone to do it. Or maybe called in a favor. (Or maybe slept with
the right person.)
"I was in LA last year. I think I went to about five different parties before I passed out."
Serafíne
It
is only when Ians turns to look back at her that Sera really notices
the make-up around his eyes. She smiles again, this time catching her
lower lip between her teeth. There's some sort of lag time in the
middle that is almost visible - the spark of awareness like a match
struck to a fuse that sizzles through her lean frame before her
expression changes, her dilated eyes flashfocus. Something. Shift from
his eyes to his cheeks to the smear of the lights around his head and
back again.
Her hand is still in his hair, gliding over a few loose strands. She smells: rich, and sweaty, and spicy, and sweet.
"Did you dress up like this, then, too? Or something else?"
The
edge of her grin, then, cutting past his profile and rising, then
dropping toward the circular table in the center of the couch pit.
She's looking for her drink, man, but there's no reason for Ian to know though. He probably just thinks she's drifting.
"Like Spiderman, or the Hulk. Or a cowboy. Oh fuck, Ian. You should dress up as a cowboy. Do the universe a favor and wear some goddamned chaps."
Ian
[Per+Alertness - does he notice?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (1, 2, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )
Ian
Ian
laughed. He laughed in a way that felt genuine, rolling back his head
and letting out this lush, rolling sound that almost made you forget he
was the only person here who wasn't on something. The light reflected
off of his fangs. (See, even like this he was not soft. All striking
angles and sharp points and instinct.)
"I didn't really have a
proper costume. Just had one of the make up girls at the photo-shoot do
some abstract glittery thing to half my face. Maybe I'll do a cowboy
thing next year."
(Maybe not.)
Ian glanced up at
Sera with his tiger's eye contacts and watched her for a moment. Then he
swung his gaze back in the direction of the table, where a bottle of
something was sitting open and half-consumed. Without needing to ask, he
leaned forward and grasped the neck, handing it up to her.
Let it not be said that he wasn't observant.
"Looking for this?"
Serafíne
(Dex + Athletics: Reach for bottle or fall off couch? +2 dif for substances.)
Dice: 6 d10 TN8 (2, 2, 4, 4, 7, 10) ( success x 1 )
Serafíne
"You could do it tomorrow!"
Sera is insisting, in a way that seems childlike without sliding into
petulance. She's smiling with the words, breathing in around the idea
of tomorrow, which is an open door, which is still a promise, still a
possibility. "I figure Halloween can last as long as you want it to
last. I'm gonna dress up as much as I fucking want."
Then her
eyes refocus. She feels Ian's laughter as much as she hears it,
stippled beneath her fingertips and she wonders - she does wonder this -
if it is the first genuine thing he has ever done in her presence, and
she's kinda rising, by which we mean, leaning upward, leveraged a bit
awkwardly on her crooked right arm when he produces her bottle of
Stranahan's, much to Sera's absolute delight.
"YESSSSSSS."
-
so she exclaims, laughing, reaching for it, more than a little bit
breathless and she's kinda reaching for it with both arms, rolling
forward and turning in toward Ian in a way that makes her start to, you
know, sliiiide off the spine of the couch and into / onto Ian before she
catches herself at the last minute, herself and the bottle of whiskey, from which she takes a solid pull before offering it wordlessly to Ian.
Ian
It
was not the first genuine thing that Ian had done in her presence.
Perhaps just the first thing that registered. (And like those other
moments, it was just as likely to fade in memory. A sliding moment in
time.) Sera spoke about an endless Halloween filled with as many
costumes as she could imagine, and Ian offered her the kind of softly
amused smile that someone might give to a child. Not really meeting her
enthusiasm, but not judging it either. She took the bottle of
Stranahan's from him with a sound of absolute delight, and see...
He
saw her about to fall. Saw the way her balance tipped. And Ian, who was
not drunk and who had animal-perfect reflexes, could probably have
caught her. But he didn't try. And in the end, he didn't need to,
because Sera caught herself.
But when she offered him the bottle, he just shook his head.
Sera
had seen Ian drinking before. He didn't have any particular aversion to
it. Had, in fact, gotten fairly drunk at Elijah's house party (just
before singing karaoke in front of a room full of strangers - which was
likely something that a number of the Denver mages would have paid to
see.) But for whatever reason, he wasn't drinking now. Maybe he didn't
want to accidentally forget that he had fangs in and try to give some
guy a blowjob in the bathroom.
"Hopefully tomorrow I'll be too fucking tired to do much of anything."
He
reached up to thread his fingers over a section of Sera's unspooled
hair, returning the gesture casually. Then he got to his feet and hopped
gracefully over the top of the pit.
"Have fun." His voice was a warm, sultry note as he bid his farewell, padding off barefoot to make his way back downstairs.
Serafíne
Sera
does not really need the alcohol, not tonight. She has other things in
her system that make her body curve, make her aware of her heartbeat
and the movement of the stars, of the curve of the universe, the
unspooling arms of something great and fine and terrible that moves like
a current beneath them all. She feels both anchored and threaded,
joyful and mournful, and for all that she is giving herself over so
thoroughly to delight right now that Ian is smiling at her the way one would smile at a child, in an hour or two she will spend twenty minutes just crying in a stall in the ladies' room,
without ever, precisely, admitting why.
But oh, she knows.
Knows
too why Ian hopes he'll be too fucking tired to do much of anything,
tomorrow, falls back against the spine of the couch, half-lifting her
chin to watch him as he reaches for her golden hair and then stands to
climb over her. Head aslant, chin against the quite spare frame of her
shoulders, hovering just over the golden line of a painted collarbone,
her regarding sweeping up and askant as he rises, her hand sliding from
his hair, back to her body.
"Does it help?" Something soft, and dark, and bruisingly aware in her eyes. "The dancing?"
Serafíne
(AWARENESS YADDA.)
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 7 ) Re-rolls: 1
Ian
[Subterfuge because it's Ian]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 4, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1
Ian
He
turned back when she asked that question. And already some of the veil
was coming back over his eyes. But he was honest when he said,
"Yeah. It does."
He'd be dead by now if it didn't.
And
maybe that was the reason why he wasn't drinking, moreso than
pragmatism. Maybe for Ian, transcendence came when he was most awake in
his own body. He wanted to dance for hours, and then he wanted to find
someone to fuck until the sun came up (maybe more than one someone) and
he didn't want anything that might take the edge off. That might slow
him down. That might make the world a little less sharp. He felt much
the same now as he had downstairs. Less wild and immediate, but the
impulses and emotions lurking under his skin were the same.
This
was an intermission. A brief one. And for a few moments he'd let
himself be calm. Let himself exist within Sera's space without needing
to express some kind of primal drive. But now that intermission was
over.
The truth was, Sera already knew what he was feeling. A
different shade from her own, perhaps. But he'd been shaken. And he
needed to find his way back to himself.
And yes, dancing helped. So that was what he did.
Serafíne
"Good."
-
says Sera, smiling now, painfully, quietly. Her eyes are shining.
She's inhaling in this way that seems to both require and consume her
whole body and holding his eyes until he has climbed back over her,
ready to return to the noise and the movement upstairs.
Later she will be dancing, too. But she probably won't come into his orbit.
They'll be dancing for different reasons, and both will know it.
"Night Ian."
