Martyred Slaves of Time and Afterschool Specials

Serafí­ne

It is evening, it is evening falling into night and there is a sort of living warmth that still lingers in the air, the grass retains some last slivers of that strange sun-scent even though the sun itself has sunk more-or-less into shadow to the west. So here is light, twilight, which is painted in a half-dozen hues of heather and mist, which gathers in pools of shadow and spreads itself wide over a slowly waking world.

The chantry is surrounded by field and farrow and hill and dale. One could keep horses here, with enough of the right sort of work and an eye for the land. There is a gentle slope leading down from the chantry proper to one of those fields, the sort framed by split-rail fencing carefully repaired last season by someone-who-is-not-Sera, and it is on this gentle slope that Sera spread a fringed cotton-quilt likely appropriated from one of the bedrooms in the house proper, trampling down the long, still-mostly-dormant stalks of some prairie grass or other, toeing off her boots so that her feet were bare, then - well - shimmying out of nearly everything else so that she could sunbathe topless and not worry much about whether the pattern of her fishnets might be somehow tanned into her skin.

The sun's gone down, though. It's gotten colder. So, Sera has put most of her clothes back on - her stockings and her denim cut-offs, her bustier and her flannel shirt - and she is lying sprawled in the grass with her feet planted flat, her knees bent, her blonde hair spread around her face like a halo, one hand wrapped loose around the neck of a bottle of mead, the other flat on her bare, golden stomach, a rather twee picnic basket - yes picnic basket - on the grass beside her blanket. Closed, for now.

She's watching the sky change.

Breathing.

Just breathing.

Gallowglass

[Awareness.]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 6, 6, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )

Gallowglass

[Stamina]

Dice: 2 d10 TN8 (3, 5) ( fail )

Gallowglass

Breathing, then - just breathing is Dominic Adam Julian Gallowglass bani Bonisagus in the library of Bear House with his head pillowed in the crook of his elbow and his mouth slack and drool at the corner and his eyes gummed shut and he doesn't snore and he does look peaceful except for a crease along his forehead because he is asleep and his sleep is not nightmare-troubled but it isn't comfortable because he fell asleep at one of the library's desks. Breathing, then - just breathing is Dominic Adam Julian Gallowglass bani Bonisagus deep in the word-wood when a dull pang causes him to open his eyes and smack his tongue against his teeth and sit up, eyelids pink-rimmed, dream-choked, hair sticking up on one side and flattened on the other, and he looks around. Opens his eyes wide but his lids want to stay sloped, putting both hands on the desk's edge and pushing back.

He is Aware of somebody else near-by, not far-off, somebody who is enthralling, limimal, he can taste that liminality right now because he is still half-asleep, eyes drifting closed. He looks down at his journal, his pen and his papers, at the book he was using as a reference for notes and he closes the latter.

Clearly he needs a break if he's falling into a sleep that doesn't give him any genius insights.

Breathing, just breathing - he's just breathing when he leaves the house and comes strolling out across field and farrow and hill and dale at least across grass. The skin of his arms is goose-pimpling, cold. He looks sleepy still and just being Aware of a presence doesn't mean that one will find that Presence until one uses the Sphere of Correspondence but he has a hunch and he's following that hunch.

Sometimes his hunches are good as gold, no alchemy required. (But there's an alchemy to the mind, isn't there? Mind meeting fire, meeting - ) When he sees the little picnic, he says,

"Hey."

Serafíne

Who is that talking to me!

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 2, 4, 4, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

So, see.

It takes her a minute. She wasn't expecting him. But then:

"Hey."

Her hair smells like marijuana and oh look, there's a blue glass ashtray shaped like a leaf on the quilt beside her and the remnants of two or three cigarettes with blue paper and a scent like burnt cinnamon-clove-sugar-tobacco in the air; and also, the mustier, earthier, skunkier scent of tobacco and Sera does not stand up over even sit, she just tips the crown of her head backwards scrunching up: her golden hair and the patterned and now-grass-stained blanket and it makes her feel like an inchworm which she rather likes.

inch inch inchworm

And Sera smiles, this lazy and ridiculous and lovely smile, which is whole in the way that planets are whole, that galaxies are whole, that fucking universes are whole: everything seems contained within it.

"Have a seat." Lifting the mead-bottle in his... rather vague direction. "You want a drink?"

Gallowglass

His cheek is still creased by the attentions of his sleeve, the edge of his journal, the edge of a page from his journal; his beard is close-trimmed tonight, just a little more than a neat on his jaw and around his mouth (as if he were a musketeer). He rubs his eyes with the palm of his left hand, planting his feet into the still-fallow just-greening wisps of prairie grass, his weight hard on the heels of his old converse high-tops (navy blue), and her laziness reminds his body that it would like to be lazy, that it is exhausted, and he yawns to keep it from bothering him about that exhaustion any more.

Have a seat. He's thinking about it. He starts with a crouch, which makes him wince. Adam is not a lithe jungle cat ready for action nor is he an action hero, used to springing out've cars and scaling the sides of buildings. He's a punk ass book jockey, and they do not stretch enough.

"What is it?" he says, with a dip of his head toward the mead-bottle - tilting his brow like he'd have a rack of antlers and was using those with which to indicate. Then, curiously, "Have we ever spoken when you were not on drugs?"

Serafíne

What is it? Adam asks and,

"Redstone mead," Sera supplies, turning both her eyes and her golden head to watch him as the enormous tower of his body (from the prospective of a singularly prone position and rather Altered mind) compresses itself down into a crouch. Her eyes are half-closed but her smile lingers and it is nothing like a shadow; and there is in it no shadow of the shadows that have touched her days.

She runs a thoughtful finger down the foil broken to access the cork. Her nails are painted a deep and irridescent red-to-black color that may look like blood and may look like candied applies in the correct light, but probably seems merely dark in this fae twilight.

"And I don't fucking know," her head doesn't leave the ground. This is now deliberate; she likes the way it feels and the way the quilt bunches beneath her skull and the way "Maybe. Why do you ask?"

A moment later, tongue against the roof of her mouth, Sera, whose body feels like a warm and lazy species of sponge soaking in the whole goddamned world, looks back at Adam and inhales, as if breathing were some new and recently discovered form of sexual congress. "I like drugs. You know that Baudelaire poem, right?"

Gallowglass

[Does he? Int + Academics, I guess.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Gallowglass

The first time Adam had mead he thought that he would like it. He didn't like it. He didn't like how sweet it was how cloying on his tongue. He considers the bottle now and Serafíne's offer and Serafíne and she is gorgeous, isn't she. So many gorgeous women in Denver. The tension of a frown or trouble on his brow and he demures with this line of bullshit - " - mead is something I've sworn to only drink with one of the sídhe but thanks for the offer."

He does sit hard on his tailbone. Half-rolling to the side, because for all his basic self-assurance he is graceless. He straightens himself, grass-slicked soles re-planted on the ground. He's on the border of the blanket she culled from one of the bedrooms. He doesn't really care about sitting in the dirt.

His hands come together again, elbows resting on his knees, one forearm clasped by his other's hand.

"I know that Baudelaire poem. The martyred slaves of time one? Do you feel like a martyred slave of time?" He's curious, and his curiousity's a relentless thing. He even says it now: "I just wondered if your thoughts," a pause. "Why do you like drugs?"

He doesn't sound as judgmental as he could; just a touch fascinated, a touch careful, constrained.

Serafíne

Does Sera feel like a martyred slave of time?

"Fuck no."

Now Sera turns her head in Adam's general direction but she's no longer looking at him because he is too close to really be seen from this perspective, so perhaps she is looking at his grass-slicked Converse soul, and she knows the stars on the underside, that familiar pattern, and finds them charmingly surprising, she would've thought that punk-ass book jockeys would be in wingtips - worn, well-worn, shabby old wingtips - but wingtips nonetheless, and that knights would wear something clanky and spurred.

"It's the rest of it I like. That goddamned admonition to love something and inhale it so thoroughly you're intoxicated by it. Let yourself be transported, right? Give yourself over to something that just - inhales you, and makes you inhale like every fucking breath you're taking is a brand new revelation."

A small shrug here. A quiet, humming grin. The flannel shirt open and framing the slice of her body, the cropped leather bustier covered with silver studs. The slightly concave curve of her abdomen, her spare torso boasts a subtle sort of musculature that is defined more by the absence of fat than by the presence of strength. There are hints of ink beneath her right breast and scrawled down her left flank; other bits more visible on her hands and wrists and palms.

"And I like drugs because I'm the grass and I'm the sky and I'm the ground beneath my head and I'm that airplane all the fucking way up there going somewhere and never coming back; and all the people inside it drowsing or dreaming or fucking or complaining about that crying baby in seat 9-a or doing some goddamned boring shit when they should be getting goddamned drunk, someway or somehow, on something that makes their heart burst and their blood quicken and their body want. All those people and everyone else I'll never see, now or in the future, Amen.

"That is why I like them in general. Why the fuck do you like books?"

Adam

Books aren't the same as drugs. He wants to articulate this to her. He wants to be clear. He can feel like there's a perfect nail and hammer eloquence for this moment somewhere but he doesn't possess it. The dark-haired [Dream-haired, wild-haired] young man with sleep-crust still in the corners of his eyes (the Sandman) rubs his face. Blinks as he does. Thumb against one cheekbone, fingertips against the other, pulling down and then up, like his face is a mask. His forehead creases and his hairline moves, and then he settles again with one forearm clasped in his hand leaning against his knees the cold spare still-wintering grass and dirt bleeding through his pants. But it's green around the chantry house, isn't it? Green with an encouraged verdancy, the edge of rot-leaf, leaf-rot, summer at its fullest, always about to cusp-over. It's one of the only ways the chantry house feels magickal to the Hermetic when he visits it. That and all the resonances which wash through. He has never felt anyone but Serafíne actually Working there.

"Because books aren't real." That's what he tells Serafíne. "But they're very good at remembering what might be or was or is. I like books because they're full of clues and they smell good and they're for everybody, if everybody would only get off their rears."

"But books aren't the same thing as drugs." Serafíne is a Cultist. Fine. But: "They won't kill me or take pieces of me away so that something else will rush into the hole."

Serafíne

Sera is sunning herself though there's hardly any sun left. So maybe she's starring herself or mooning herself or skying herself. Something. Something inherently and implicitly open about her sprawl there on the blanket on the grass beneath the sky. The halo of her hair and the lazy coil of her regard and even her posture shifts, one shoulder tucking into the ground, the other rising from it, the flexcoil of her abdomen both sinuous and insinuating as she moves, pulls up her left arm until she's resting braced on her elbow, head up now, watching him.

And she is going to tell Adam that she likes his shoes and that the other difference between books and drugs is that you can totally have sex while you are on drugs and no so much while you are reading, so hey. That is a clear point in favor of drugs, and there's this playful counterpoint in her to his seriousness, surely he can sense that behind her eyes, surely she can read something in the exhausted brush of his hand over his face, in that want in him to make his point so very clear to her.

And she makes the occasional noise backgrounded behind his points, see. Here and there, quiet beneath this statement (they're for everyone) or that one (if only everyone would get off their rears) until the end and he finishes and all those things she was going to say dissolve quietly on her tongue and what is left, see, what is left is this:

"Is that what you think I am?" Steadily, quietly, assuredly. Her attention like a spark, her eyes - in the gloaming - the darkest sort of flame. "A hole waiting to be filled? With whatever rushes in?"

Adam

"No." He is so opinionated that it sounds definitive; like a door, slamming. No. But is he telling the truth? He rubs his jaw with the palm of his hand, facial hair scraping against his life-line and the predictions of future children and happiness and health that lie there. "People aren't holes. But I don't understand how -- "

He pauses, and he is frowning. He is serious-eyed, and his expression is grave, and he is frowning, because it is difficult.

"I don't understand how being so aided and abetted does anything other than eventually make holes in who you are. I don't understand how it doesn't eventually become a stone dragging you down."

"You say that, erm, they make you feel that admonition to love something, to be transported, right, inhales you as you inhale it like that snake which devours its own tail. Your Working feels like you're between thresholds, like you're on the threshold and you're a motion there, right, or like it's instinctive, it's viscera, so why the... So, hmm."

"All of that together is why I asked."

Adam

ooc: *cross-out* "ask." PRESENT TENSE, Adam.

Serafíne

"Hmm," Sera makes this noise see and with the noise beneath her tongue and under her skin she sinks back down, though this time she tucks a hand beneath the back of her skull, one arm crooked out in his directly, the crawl of her tattoes all the more visible, the washboard grace of her ribs beneath her skin, all that open-ness, all that vulnerability.

And she breathes out after it not precisely a sigh, just a different sort of noise that skims the threshold of awareness, or maybe, just maybe, rides it like the edge of a wave, and her eyes closes and when they open again he is still there, a shadowless-shadow on her periphery and she breathes him in and breathes him out and breathes him in again, him, Adam, and that green-grass smell.

"I'm the same person when I wake up, no matter where I wake up, no matter what-from. Mouth sour and skin soft and last night like a twist of paper in the back of my mind. Present, and it doesn't matter if I lose time or if I find it again, strange beneath my fingertips, and there are holes in me, but there are holes in everyone, aren't there? Shallow and deep and black and bright and every fucking thing in between.

"Fuck. I don't know what I'm saying. Except that maybe we put the goddamned holes in ourselves and fill them or let them be." Her mouth twists wry and she exhales, see and rolls her head again to fix her eyes more firmly on him.

Smiles.

"Can I ask you a question?"

Adam

He has not a lick of wariness although when women ask Adam Gallowglass (Christopher Halloway) that question what follows is rarely something that pleases him. Can I ask you a question? Sure. When did you become such a dick? I don't know. Can I ask you a question? Another one, you mean. When did you think this was going to work? Can I ask you a question? All right. And then something bad, or boring, or --

He has not a lick of wariness. He eyes Serafíne quietly, his expression poised between expressions, a shadow in his eyes; a fleeting thing because he's far too grave, isn't he? Grave as the grass beneath him; grave as somebody whose armor does not flash might be. Grave as a magician in a wood.

"Sure; fair's fair."

Serafíne

"How'd you lose your shadow?"

That's the question. That's the question on her tongue and beneath her skin, the question she shares with him in the grass in the garden with the remnants of her picnic all around and a fine but rather pedestrian buzz going, just enough to remind her that she is everything and that there is something particularly lovely about the way her body stretches when she moves, about the cold air on her skin, about the quiet drift of voices on the wind, and the way the sun deserts the earth,

only to come back to her, again and again and again.

Sera wishes, idly, that Hawksley were here.

They could have sex in the grass.

Adam

"I didn't lose it," Adam says.

The question does draw first a swift look, because she noticed. Many mages do notice eventually, but it always draws a swift look from Adam; something that is careful, something that is measuring, that is watchful. Demons take shadows, drag them away; devils unstitch them from people's heels sometimes. Lost shadow can be a found curse, can be a sign of something uncanny, something unnatural, something witching.

Adam didn't lose his shadow. "It was taken when I awoke properly, but I imagine it will be given back soon enough. Do you know much about the Order?" - because of her sun-soaked friend, that must be why he asks, when he assumes the answer is no or should be no. "I had my shadow when it first found me and kept it for a year after I think."

Serafíne

"I know they come for you before you wake. Find you and groom you and cultivate you. Make you memorize lists and draw symbols and fetch what there is to be fetched and chant what there is to be chanted until the day the world opens up for you, all-sudden, and lo there you are.

"Which sounds way too much like Catholic school to me."

A low breath out, which sounds rather like a laugh.

Sera wants a cigarette, wants it less idly than she wants sex-with-Hawksley in the grass, wants it, in just that moment, more keenly, but she is also a lazy creature, more given to indulgence than discipline and the cigarettes are too far away so,

for now,

she just wants.

"They took it from you when you woke up? Like as a seal or a punishment or a tie-that-binds?"

A beat. Her hand flat on the lean and concave curve of her bare stomach. "Did they unstitch it from your skin?

"Did it hurt?"

Adam

He laughs. He doesn't laugh very often. He chuckles, sometimes, and he hehs. He occasionally grins, but he doesn't often laugh. He laughs now and there are lines fanning out around his eyes when he does so, dimples carving long down his cheeks, no light in his eyes because Adam's personality is not such that his eyes ever capture light well, but they are animated by the spirit of that laughter. He is rather scrawny is Adam and he hunches when he laughs so he's a C again because that is his letter, his illuminated manscript letter. He winds up choking, coughing, phlegm from his chest and that means he blinks with surprise like a man dunked into water shifts his weight onto one lean-skinbone wrist and beats his chest with the fist of his other hand, cough hack, laugh, grin, diminish.

"No, they didn't take it, and it wasn't a punishment, though I suppose you might call it a seal or a tie-that-binds. It is something that happened between myself and my," a pause. "Seeking."

There; they spoke of those recently, didn't they? And Awakening for Adam was just another Seeking, except that it was - he tells himself the story of it being - deliberate. "They don't 'come for you' before you wake; not all the time. Sometimes you find them. It's not really that Catholic, except for the Latin, the reverence for ritual."

Serafíne

Adam laughs and he does not laugh very often and Sera has never heard him laugh but he laughs now and he laughs until he chokes and he chokes until his beats his chest and beats his chest until he's wheezing and Sera, lazy-Sera, languid-Sera, idly-thinking-of-Hawksley Sera tilts the crown of her head back, hair pulling against the little nibs of the cotton quite, watches him through the upslant of her gaze, all peripheral, arches her spine a bit for a better look, and when she is satisfied that he is not going to choke to death, that that spell was all laughter, she laughs too,

and oh, she laughs with her body as much as her throat as much with her voice as much with her eyes. Like a snake, see, undulant on the grass.

"And the old men telling you what the fuck to do, that's how it's always been done that's why, getting pissed off at you for making out with Katie O'Connor in the sacristy when you should be memorizing your goddamned begats. I mean aren't there some similarities there, too?

"I'd rather make out with Katie. She had freckles everywhere."

The a pause, a beat, a raveling.

"So did you find them, or did they find you?"

Adam

"I found them." That's his first answer; and it is definitive. Defined; there is no room to move. Until: "But my aunt, the one who owns the bookshop where I work, she has always been connected to the Order. I didn't know her when I was growing up, but," and he runs his fingers through his hair, combing it.

The remnants of laughter still animate his expression; they're still visible; still seen; diminishing returns, though.

"How'd you meet Dan?" he asks, but he also stands up, ungainly, with a creak and a wince, and brushes the seat of his pants off, like he is getting ready to go inside.

He is getting ready to go inside. He'll try to get Sera to go inside, too, and carry the blanket, because he wants to hear how she met Dan, but maybe Sera will want to stay outside under the stars and Adam isn't luring her with a Ruse tonight.

Serafíne

Sera hums around Dan's name, around the thought-of Dan, around the idea-of him, and around other things, as well, which Adam does not know and cannot fathom, and she relishes the cool air on her skin and the gathering dark, the goosepimples that are raised where the rather-gentle-for-the-high-plains-tonight wind finds her bare skin.

And she watches him still, watches him stand, watches him dust-himself-off with that efficiency that people readying themselves to depart always seem to shed with every movement and -

"I met Dan in Brooklyn." A small shrug sketched against the ground. Adam will try to get Sera to go inside, but he doesn't have a Ruse and she wants the night. "I was going through some heavy shit and he helped me through it. Figured out we made pretty good songwriting partners, too. So."

Which does not precisely answer the meat of his question, but it is what Sera knows and what she can give, easily, tonight.

"Goodnight, Adam." Her smile is - indulgent, welcoming, enthralling, and in that brief moment, entirely for him. He can go inside: She's staying here, she's staying put.