As water wants to fall [Past]

N. Hyde
There are not many people awake at this hour of the night on Christmas Eve.  It's not a long drive to Pen's from the bar, but they'd driven separately (they're still new, yet) and the main streets of town have become a light-lined promenade, and Nick is tired.  These ten minutes that he has to himself to think are more than he has had all night.  His thoughts turn naturally to his family - Anna, likely having gone to bed early to try to relive some of the childlike thrill of the night; April (in his head he still calls her that) and creation knows what; his mother, perhaps wondering after her children.

He has turned the radio off.  Every station has only Christmas music.  Thane took Charlie after all, and he is somewhat glad of that.

Ordinarily he is not a careful driver, but he lags behind Pen now: the snow, it still catches him off his guard in the way even a light dusting makes the asphalt surprisingly slick.  His tiny subcompact (he doesn't yet have the money to upgrade) lingers behind her on the deserted road.

In time though, they arrive; he pulls up behind Pen in her driveway and cuts the engine, which is a blessing: his car needs a new muffler.  As he steps out, Nick casts an eye around the neighborhood, which he does almost every time he pulls up in front of Pen's house.  The style of the buildings is fascinating to him, the feel of Oldness, the lingering quiet sadness of the big grand houses in disrepair; perhaps he has expressed this, on a different day.  He has hauled a small duffel bag out of his car.

He walks over to Pen, then with her to the door.  His silence is comfortable, companionate.

P. Mercury
The door is festooned in evergreen, then it is up a slippery ("Careful," Pen says, each time, though she is the more likely to do something incautiously) iron spiral stair case to the third floor apartment. Pen's house was once a convent though it has gone through many changes since its convent days and it has a number of unusual features because of this, but the top floor apartment looks like it could be a ball room instead - broad, hard-wood floors, expansive. There are two rooms. Three, if we include the rectangular bathroom.

The main room and most of the apartment is a vast expanse with the eaves a-shingle, an open-plan kitchen and dining area, and then the room which is compassed by books and books and more books and did we mention books and it spills out into the tower which is attached to this house and there is another stair which leads up to the widow's walk. The bed is on the far side of the vasty ballroom room abutting the tower and book room; it is big and comfortable and has a wooden headboard. There are two swords above it, and beside it a case of swords; really there are a remarkable number of daggers and strange oddments on display in Pen's apartment. Some herbs growing too, near the windows, most of which have shutters instead of curtains.

After letting Nick in, Pen turns to him and bumps her head against his shoulder and inhales deeply and then sighs; as suddenly as she does that, she tells him to make himself at home and beelines to the bathroom, dragging her coat off as she does.

Around some of the windows she has twinkle lights, white ones, and a number of candles - some of them are holiday themed, but it's mostly austere touches or shabby-chic ones. Ornaments hanging from the twinkle lights home-made or thrift-found.

N. Hyde
Nick breathes in deeply upon arriving in Book Room, as he always does.  This is not necessarily a familiar smell to him, pleasant though it is; Nick did not grow up around books, or in a family of readers.  For him it has been more of an acquired taste.  It is becoming familiar, and comfortable, and many of the things he associates with home.

As he steps through the door after Pen, her head bumps against his shoulder and his hand finds its way to the small of her back to hold her there for however long she stays; it is a reflex.  Pen, understandably, beelines for the bathroom; she was almost cut open, and Nick quite understands the need to shower.

He pulls his coat off and hangs it over a doorknob, where it rests haphazard and threatening to fall off to the floor at any moment.  Someday, they will have a dog, and Nick will do the same thing, and he will be forever running over his coats and jackets with a lint roller.

Nick is not so comfortable with Pen's space yet that he knows immediately where to go, how to make himself at home.  He lingers in this main space for a little while: he runs his eyes and his fingertips over titles, absorbing what Pen has chosen to include here, and he looks at the swords, and he peers out the window at the quiet streets.

Then he wanders into the kitchen, finds a tea kettle, fills it, and sets it on the stove.  Locates two mugs; this is easy enough.  Fumbles around with bags of loose leaf tea (he had never made it Before Pen) and, through reading the bags, has figured out enough to pour it into the strainer in the teapot and ready it to steep.  It would have been easier to use the tea bags also available, but tea bags do not impress.

Nick lingers at the window until the whistle sounds, then busies his hands and his thoughts with making it steep.  It's no wonder some Traditions find this to be a meditative experience.

P. Mercury
The books run the gamut. Those that are more in the rounded tower portion of the room and the center are arcane books, books of strange names and books of strange languages. A number of the books are in Greek, and there are some scrolls, bundled together in silver scroll-holders hanging from a hook on one of the shelves. There is a desk in the middle of most of the books -- easy to imagine Pen working there, because she does.

Pen does not spend too, too long in the bathroom all told. There is a sound of running water, pipes protesting; the water pressure is acceptable but not wonderful. Old house, old house problems, some of which can be fixed with Magick but one has to wonder whether or not good water pressure is worth the trouble of dealing with all of the work that goes into Working.

The tea he has chosen begins to turn a deep, berry red - the fragrance curls.

When Pen leaves the bathroom, her hair is in a twist at the nape of her neck and her bangs and fluffed and messy, and she has on a high-collared robe - satin, see, of course, because Pen likes fine and elegant and too-expensive things, a blush pink. Not a Nick-blush or a Liz-blush, but a blush-pink just the same.

"I don't want tea, I want you," she tells Nick, after she's taken in the tea preparations with a smile and after she's dropped onto the couch and after he's brought the tea or himself over. She means it in every sense. The Hermetic woman's is fey, see, and expressive; so her eyes could be called as clear as lake-light and shadow-light dripping from a sword, dragging fire out of the day; which is to say, intent and ardent and without apparent guile.

After a little pause, "But I'll take the tea first. Do you want to tell me about choosing your role now?"

This isn't a bid for him to tell her now if he doesn't want to, but opening that particular book at the bookmark placed earlier when they were in the snow.

N. Hyde
Both the tea and Nick are brought over to the couch; he sets it down close to Pen first, and then drops himself rather unceremoniously onto the couch next to her.  Nick: most people would assume he'd be shy, that he'd draw into himself or redden in the face of that ardence; but reserved, see, it doesn't necessarily equate to easily embarrassed or ashamed.

His smile is playful, somewhat rakish even, where it can be glimpsed playing at the edges of his features.  His expressions are often subtle; they can be hard to read - he has gotten used to muddling them, for all sorts of reasons.  "Well, you have me," he says, then, almost somber, "but I can understand if you'd want tea first."

She questions him about his role, and it is clear from the way his eyes unfocus for a few seconds that Nick had forgotten that they were talking about this earlier.  He is not used to being questioned; perhaps she will have noticed this, too.  Conversations are more easily controlled than many people want to believe, and genuine questions into the lives and thoughts of other people, well, they're so gentle and eliciting that few people would ever guess that that's one of the goals.

Nick stretches his legs out, dropping them over her lap and folding an arm over the back of the couch.  He discarded his boots and his sweater some time ago.  "Did you ever meet Delilah?  She wasn't here for very long."  A pause, to allow Pen to acknowledge the name or not.  "Anyway, back when I was Disparate, I would run into her a lot.  Not always her, but when I spoke to some of the spirits, they knew ofher, and I think she started to know of me for the same reason."

He pauses; he is trying to organize his thoughts.  This sort of self-narrative does not come naturally to him.  "At the beginning of the year before I graduated, there was this girl at the crisis center who would come in a lot, so I knew her pretty well.  The LPN didn't take her belt away like they're supposed to do, and I was the one who found her."  Pause.  "You're supposed to be prepared for stuff like that, but you never are.  And I was doing a lot of things I shouldn't, like poking around in the spirit world, and I think I got sucked into it for a while.  So I talked to Delilah about it, and it just...led into the role."

P. Mercury
The coffee table is one of those with a glass lid and little compartments beneath which have things of interest for display in each of the compartments, a curiosity box turned into a table. The coasters are the kind grabbed from any bar or brewery, with perhaps one coaster from an exhibit at the Metropolitan thrown in for good measure, and a coaster is where Pen's tea goes. (Pen is daring but that does not equal careless, and Pen is careful with physical objects. Nick will learn that about her one day. She isn't a hoarder, but she's always saving things to be repurposed later. She freezes food. Mends. Pen's family was poor in a way that sticks.) Some people don't know where to put their hands when somebody else has draped their legs across their lap, but Pen is not one of those; she shifts for comfort's sake and runs her fingers in caressing circles around Nick's knees and thighs while he's telling his -

story? He's not very good at telling a story. Also, it seems like a sad story. She wouldn't expect anything less of a Chakravanti, though. She's never met one with a happy tale; but it would be strange for it to be otherwise, no?

He was the one who found her. Pause. Pen slides her left hand as far down his shin as it'll go; then shifts so she can take his feet in her hands and work them. Thumb press here, fingers squeeze there; the only manipulation Pen is comfortable with. It would be wrong to say the gesture is thoughtless. She tucks her own feet under Nick's hip.

"Well it looks good on you, kid. You wear it like a pair of comfortable sneakers." Pause. "You think you got sucked into the spirit world?" Occulted voice now. "Did it hurt?"

N. Hyde
This is an area where he is somewhat self-conscious, if only because Nick is aware that he is not very good at telling stories.  Anna tells him this often enough ("Nick you destroyed that punchline.  Is this how you talk people into being okay with dying?  Do they wish for merciful release?") often without realizing how sharp she may come across.  This is a thing about himself he accepts somewhat sheepishly, the way some people may have given up on trying to straighten a chronically messy desk.

The ball of Pen's thumb finds a sore spot under his arch (he's been tromping around in boots most of the day, though so have they both) and he drops his head against the side of the couch.  One of his hands wedges her feet in against his hip; they're probably cold.

"Well, it's hard to say," Nick says when she asks him whether he thinks he did, which perhaps answers her next question.  He doesn't answer that one right away though, whether or not it hurt.  He adds, "There were a lot of things that weren't much different.  Just different enough.  Like...you placed that cup there, but now it's here on this table that you don't remember getting.  It blurred for a long time, is mainly what I mean.  Like I was in two places at once, but also in neither of them."

The look he is giving Pen suggests he knows he's not making any sense.  "I didn't want to leave, though, was the thing.  It was easier to think that it made sense, when it wasn't an ending."

Nick lingers on that, because he could say more; there is this weighing of a decision, and then he says, "How did you choose?"
P. Mercury
Though Pen's intent gaze (in certain lights she has fish-scale eyes, gleaming with dark and bright - the silver nuanced with other-shades too: blues and perhaps greens, even indigos. Color is complex, complicated) is three-parts attentive, one-part wanting, and one half-part melancholy (with the other half-part devoted to wanting-as-lust), she seems - almost content now. Content to continue massaging Nicholas's feet, affection in the work of it (she likes to give people Care is far more Compassionate than most people presume a Hermetic and especially a Flambeau would be), and content to continue listening without question. Troubled or puzzled over Nick's further adventures of thinking he was kinda stuck in the spirit world, troubling or puzzling over it. Pen doesn't know much about spirits. Only something of ghosts, and of Heath's end. Complicated; she has already thought of her brother tonight and it is raw to do so. When Nicholas turns the question back on her instead of saying more, Penelope hmms.
The woman is a painting, look at the way the light ripples over the pale rose of her robe when she settles her head back against the couch's arm, strong warrioress jaw a stark line red red red bangs a tousled mess with the rest of the red dark contrast again her skin, she'd have some suitable name for her portrait - the lyre hanging on the wall behind her helps the picture, as does the patterned throw. Daring, on the threshold.
"There was a courtship. I was steady, on my own and unaffiliated. But it is difficult to be alone in any city, especially I think New England where every city is a small town, so - well you know how it is when you are new and don't know what is happening or what you are doing or why the world isn't as you'd been led to believe, don't you? Or were your sisters already there for you?"
Pen tries not to sound somewhat more melancholy than other on that point, but she is imperfect and also glass. The melancholy passes, leaving behind only what is left-over from Elliot's demise and thoughts of Liz. She waits for confirmation or comment before she continues on.
N. Hyde
He spends a lot of time thinking of other people and placing their needs before his own.  This is his instinct, both as someone who empathizes readily and easily and as someone to whom detachment from his own self and emotions is second nature.  When he shares something of himself, or allows himself to be taken care of (as now), there's perhaps a sense that this is an active choice; he is doing something that does not come naturally to him.  This desire to do so, perhaps awakened by the intent (attentive [wanting]) gaze Pen has focused on him, is something that marks his dynamic with Pen as something special in his mind.  It's different; sometimes different is a good thing.
His other hand rests on her hip, and he brushes his thumb as she speaks, over the smooth fabric and curve of bone.  Nick is smoke and cinder, his hair seeming to drink in the dim light that filters through the windows and is thrown from the nearby lamp.  "I know that," he says, of when one is new and doesn't know what's happening.
There is hesitation, space in which he debates whether to add, because he asked her a question and is listening to her.  Then he adds, because lasting connection must be give-and-take, "It didn't happen for me in this defining moment, the way I hear other people talk about.  There was no before-and-after.  It was...I saw things, and I felt things, but I didn't know what they meant.  Anna explained it to me."  So yes: he knows.
He quiets then, waits for her to continue.
P. Mercury
"A piece of good fortune," Pen says, of Anna explaining it to him. She means it, though some Mages from Traditional Traditions might say otherwise. There's no fortune in being taught wrong for a while. Reflective: "I had a defining moment, after a - prologue. Of sorts. I was - bold." The curl of a smile, a languid shift of her legs. "Very bold, after I'd opened my eyes fully and was no longer sleep-walking - I was so relieved - " and she seems it. She can remember the ache of it, and it's in her voice. " - to no longer be sleep-walking, Nicholas."
"But most of what I watched or was told was so - " Pen casts her gaze up at the ceiling, as if the words are there, waiting for her to pluck them. "Not without mystery," her gaze drops back to meet Nick's, "which I want as water wants to fall, not without wonder," and she smiles, which kindles something, "which I need as the heart needs to beat, not even without truth," a wry and then thoughtful note, because Pen is not sarcastic or sardonic, only wry from experience now and again, "which is I think the fuse that drives the green force through the flower, nor even without majesty which - "
Pen sits up, a little. Leaves off massaging Nick's foot to trace under his pants and up his calf, then his shin-bone, attention given to the prickle of hair and warmth. The languor has dissipated like morning mist, replaced with - well, this air of conspiratorial gladness and awe. " - this is majestic, isn't it Nickolai-o-lay? This is drenched in majesty, or can be; it would steal me from the Fields we Know, to whatever was first - whatever was, briefly and shiningly perfect - "
Wry flick of her eyebrows. " - but everything I observed or was told was just so - selfish and pointless. We're a selfish lot, you've noticed - huh? Even when our intentions are good, we're selfish. So I was content to stay steady, resting not on my laurels but standing by my wits, and unaffiliated. My choice, though. How did I make my choice. Well it was a number of moments together.
"Richard, asking me why I was throwing away my shot. Tristan, helping me get a sense of what I felt in certain Churches, listening to Tristan talk about his Theater Troupe, the architecture of it all. Tristan asked me how I'd write anything without language. Horace - Lysander, that is. You'll meet him. He was especially persuasive.
"I suppose I made my choice because I decided I could do more in the Order than I could do outside the Order. It gave me a promise, you know, as any good lover will - it was good at courting me. You'd have fallen head-over-heels, you'd have been smitten, Nickolay-o-lai, because Horace - well. I saw that I could have a better scaffolding for my Arts, I could keep my own will and temper it just so, and that people would continue to be important and so worth cherishing and defending. Our humanity could be one of the points."
"So one day, I asked around until I found Lysander, then I told him I wanted to join the Order and he was going to be my master, or I'd find somebody better and give him cause to regret it."
N. Hyde
As water wants to fall - 
His expression shifts as hers shifts, an unconscious thing: he is a filter, drawing in this mystery and wonder and majesty and reflecting it back, this unbridled joy that pulls at the corners of his mouth as he listens to her speak.  Because he listens, and he experiences along with her, and this is perhaps some of his gift: he is with people in the thousand small ways that they die, and in their rebirth.
Nick does not interrupt.  His eyes, suspended amber, have a sort of knowing about them as she describes - just so selfish and pointless.  Pen finishes, and he laughs, not the quiet thing one might expect: it rings, crescendos suddenly the way church bells break the silence at dawn.  "I doubt he could have refused," he says, of Lysander.
There are a thousand things Pen has said that he would like to return to, and as he lifts himself to wedge into the space behind her, one arm beneath and the other around, he considers.  He gives weight to this, to her words, and Nick's expressiveness, when he is expressive, is in how he reflects back and in the way he uses anothers' words, bends them just so, to lend new meaning, to clarify and question.  "Could be one of the points?  Or is?"
P. Mercury
He doubts Lysander could have refused. Pen breathes in deep, and long, and slow; there is some voice behind the inhale, not quite a hmmmm. She likes the way Nicholas laughs; it's as attractive to her as falling is to water, eh? There's some shuffling and moving around when he wedges himself behind her, but not much; she wants to be tangled up with Nick, legs and arms and body.
"Is," like it's a surprise. "And could. It could be - but now it is."
N. Hyde
He catches the note of surprise in her answer, and his smile is pleased now, perhaps even a little conspiratorial as hers had earlier been.  There is pause in the conversation that he does not rush to fill, because he too is forgetting himself in the tangle of limbs, in the way breaths sync into a singular rhythm: there's harmony in it.
When he speaks again it's against the back of her shoulder, where he has been comfortably nuzzled in; he lifts his head somewhat to make himself heard.  "You didn't talk to Liz while we were out."  It could be misinterpreted as caution; it's an invitation, one that allows her space to speak more or speak less.
P. Mercury
"Damn, you weren't supposed to notice!" Pen says (without thinking, or meaning to, but she is low on restraint). Beat. "I can't trust her to have my back anymore. Anything I might have said to her would have been a lie, or a break-up. I don't want to do either."
N. Hyde
Nick laughs again: a different tone this time, gentled with the sort of dry humor that is more characteristic of his day-to-day affect.  Still warm; he finds the outburst endearing, finds honesty attractive.  "Because she lied?"  There is an unsaid "and" here, because Nick suspects there is an "and" even if he doesn't know what it is yet.
P. Mercury
"No, I don't care about that. People lie all the time, and I don't - I wish she hadn't been so, I don't know, panicked or focused that she chose to shoulder the weight of that alone and exclude us, but I don't blame her for that. It wasn't a shame."
N. Hyde
"No," Nick agrees, and there is this beat in which he considers what she has said.  He could keep his thoughts to himself, and often would; one doesn't trade in secrets by giving his own away, even the small ones.  But he does.  "I don't know if I trust her now either.  But I can't put my finger on why.  I - "
His brows pull together, then relax.  "I don't think she noticed."
P. Mercury
"She didn't." Beat. "I know why I can't trust her now."
Another beat, and Pen shifts herself; turning so she is facing Nicholas, although they're still entangled (more so now, perhaps) on the couch, her knee between his knees, her hand and arm up under his shirt and flat along his back. Adjust, adjust, there.
"It's because, in the moment of action, she chose to make me loose hold on my instrument, because she was in sympathy with the devil, who had my blood on his knife. She could've just focused on him, but she didn't. Because just before that, she left us when I asked her to, but did not have faith enough in what followed to stay the course."
"You just can't do that when you're fighting side-by-side, when you're part of a team. I don't - " Her expression flickers. "It's not that I don't think trying to find some way to 'untwist' that kind of soul is good; I think it noble. I think it even necessary, or righteous. But - that wasn't what this was."
N. Hyde
Having never been part of a team before - not really of any sort - it perhaps had not occurred to Nick to look at it from this perspective.  Still, there is a sort of understanding that floods his eyes as she explains, perhaps helps him make some order of his own responses to what happened tonight.  "Faithless," he says, and it is reflective, of the implications, of what it means, but also a summation.
"Do you think you could trust her again?"  And in this, perhaps, Nick will be the first one to see the ending before it comes, and accept it.
P. Mercury
"No, not when the chips are down. Otherwise, certainly. But never when the chips are down; it would be ill-done of me to forget."
Pen's eyes are bright; this is when it becomes evident that they're bright with water-light, the shimmer of tears. They don't reach her voice but when she blinks they go spilling down her cheeks; it's been a tough night, and Pen is clear; she doesn't try to wipe them away, though her eyes flick to the side before back to Nick's face.
N. Hyde
Nick also does not wipe them away; in the seconds that her eyes flick away from his (open vulnerability is difficult, even for the honest-to-a-fault), he reaches up and brushes a few strands of hair away from the side of her face where they'd otherwise stick, behind her ear.  "There are a lot of people," he says, "who would try to forget, because it's easier, and betray themselves in the process."
P. Mercury
Nicholas blurs; his eyes do, too. Hers are still lustrous and wet; the brightness shapes itself into more water, another tear and another. Pen mastered the art of silent crying back when she was a kid and the younger kids looked up to her except for Heath but he was the same. She shakes her head, says, "Perhaps; but I think the easy thing would be to remember, but to leave. I won't yet; it would be too swift a judgment, and to no purpose. What do you think Thane and Robin think?"
N. Hyde
Nick pulls Pen against him then, winds his fingers into her hair and draws her head in against his shoulder.  He is practiced at not-crying (he has to be), even in experiencing the aftershocks of another's sorrow (he is not ready to admit that some of it is his own.)  His throat is tight; perhaps she can tell.  "I don't know," he says, of Thane and Robin.  He hesitates.  "You know them better than I do.  But I think Robin is afraid that you'll leave.  Thane...I'm less sure of.  Maybe he thinks time will heal."
P. Mercury
"But you don't?"
Pause; for his reply. Her hand slips further up his back, then across his ribs. Does she count them? Certainly. It's awkward for her shoulder, but she still wants to do it, and the awkwardness isn't uncomfortable exactly; she closes her eyes against Nick's shoulder.
"Hey. What'd you think of Robin's ass in the dance video?"
N. Hyde
"It could," Nick says, and he sounds...a little surprised, perhaps, just as she had earlier.  "Not like it was.  But it could."
Nick, too, closes his eyes; there is a subtle shift of his weight as he leans into her hand.  His eyes pop open again as she asks the next question, and his voice is a layered thing, something solemn overtop the good humor beneath.  "I think maybe he missed his calling.  I was going to tease him, but I think it already upset him that we saw the video."
P. Mercury
It could, but it won't.
They don't know that right now. Pen's lashes stick together for a moment when she opens her eyes, salt-licked, salt-kissed as they are. "I don't think he was upset; he likes to be teased."
Which is not strictly true, but is true as far as Penelope knows and in Penelope's experience. Pen cannot, right now, imagine that one day she and Robin Anton will fight and they won't make up and things won't be the same between them.
But that time will come, too. Everything in its season.
Pen pulls away from Nick, untangles; but only so she can straddle him instead, hand taken from his ribs, but only so she can pull his shirt up.
Everything in its place.
"But if he is upset," and she grins, bright; it isn't feigned, or forced, and she is still melancholy, but that's only a little of what she is -  " - perhaps you could make him feel better by making your own video."
The grin goes diffuse; she wants him. The way her gaze falls is thoughtful, attentive; a moment of clarity. "I like you, Nicholas Hyde," she says. "I like how careful you are of people. And your eyes, and your bones. I like you past midnight. You're so hot: I want you and I like you."
N. Hyde
Nick accepts that Robin likes to be teased; Pen knows him far better than Nick does, after all.  He accepts that perhaps his intuition, that this is the beginning of an ending, is wrong, that things could be pulled back together even if neither of them can trust Liz when the chips are down.  He accepts this because Nick deeply wants to believe that there are things that last, and that they are not powerless in the face of the universe's tendency toward chaos.
He would have kissed her then, but instead she pulls away and straddles him, and he leans forward so she can more easily tug off his shirt, angles himself to allow her to pull off his instruments as well: a series of small bags tied to one another that hang looped around his shoulders.  He laughs as she suggests a video, and when his nose wrinkles it's out of some imagined mortification.  His compliment to Robin earlier that night, that he could never have done the same, was not empty.  "He is miles ahead of me in being able to pull off a thong."
Nick falls back after she has cast his shirt aside.  He considers her a moment as he reaches up and pulls the tie on her robe free; for once his expression is not difficult to read.  She tells him this: it embarrasses him, in this effusive, simply pleased sort of way, catches him slightly off guard perhaps, and he laughs once and says, "I've wanted you so many times tonight I've lost count.  I like you too, Pen."
He does tug her down to kiss him then, a reflection of her ardence, her daring, and perhaps for the first time that night: no thoughts of elsewheres or other times or what will be, and fully present.