It's late evening by the time the two of them have left the chantryhouse on the hill. This is one of those clear early summer (late spring) nights where the moon has begun to show its face even though the day is not over, a narrow sickle that has sliced through the pale violet of night's first gloaming to hang high in the east even as the sun dips past the treeline on the opposite end of the world. Soon they'll see a scattering of stars, all the brighter out here where it's remote.
Other people are beginning to drift out of the house as well. There'd been some late day drama when Jonas and Patricia insisted that Rachel stay the night in the house; Patricia herself left shortly thereafter, followed by the man who is like a shadow. The others will not be long after, except for Jonas who lives there and whose mortal flesh still insists on sleep past a certain hour.
They're in the car now, with the house only minutes behind them. Nick is driving with the high beams on; street lights are few and far between this far out, and he needs to be careful of deer.
Pen had texted Ari earlier that night telling her that she was dreading this ride back. Maybe she is sitting in silent dread for a little while even as Nick drives in silence, his CD player singing to itself. It is not long though before he turns his eyes from the road long enough to look over at Pen. "What did you think?"
lake-light
Pen is looking out the window, an echo of herself looking in the window, her profile twinned in the glass and dissoluble. It will (eidolon) dissolve should they come across another car's sweeping headlights, but otherwise remain: serene, remote, untouchable.
The line of her shoulders is graceful; the evening lends its wondering darkness to her sometimes pale eyes. They drive. It's not long before:
"Nicholas." | What did you --
"..." | -- think?
Click, her throat.
"I didn't expect it. It was not what I expected at all, but I'm glad you invited me."
crow
She'd said his name, before he'd started speaking. It was one of those moments where she'd spoken, and he'd started speaking just them too, and had finished before it registered with him that perhaps she'd been about to -
Well. The moment is gone.
"What did you expect?" His question is genuinely curious, or at least it has the tone of such. It's the sort of question that from many other people could have been leading. He spares another glance from the road over at her, takes in her reflection in the glass opposite him and how it both clarifies and obscures, how she is superimposed over the fields in front of her.
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Pen watches the road whip by beneath the car, a dark river. They are on a dark river, and you can never step in the same river twice.
"I expected to know only you." It sounds like a line could be used to good effect in a ballad or a song. "And I don't know what else. Something that felt less homey, perhaps. Gladstone Manor," which has a cooler name, but we shall never learn it, "does not have that same feel, nor does [Hermetic Chantry Name]. The books sometimes feel homey, but even then it is only sometimes."
crow
"There are chantries that are Chakravanti run that feel less like that," Nick says. "Or, at least, I've heard tell of a few that are very old and very imposing, especially in Asia. I think Miles and Patricia have had a heavy influence in the feel of this one."
His tone is fond. He is not especially close to either of them, but he likes them; they and Jonas all have taken over his teaching at one point or another with Delilah gone.
He, too, is watching the road as it winds beneath them, cuts a path through fields and wood. "I didn't expect you to know anyone there either, though I guess it shouldn't surprise me." After all: they both had Awakened life before each other. "How do you know Jonas and Miles?"
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[Poise & Control enough to make Lysander proud, right?]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (4, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )
crow
[Pssst. I see through Lysander too, most of the time.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 6, 6, 6, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 6 ) [Doubling Tens]
lake-light
Pen rests her brow against the glass and watches Nicholas's face (he sounds fond) until he mentions Miles and Patricia and then she looks out at the road again. Only for a moment because after he asks her, Pen parts her lips to feel the air when she draws it back into her lungs. She misses a breath, but it is not raw and it is not a shock. It would not be fair to say that Pen is pained by Nicholas's question although it goes into her like an elf dart. Expected it is but one cannot guard against an elf dart. They always strike true. They always get the heart.
Pen is pained by the answer to his question but what does the difference look like? Pen sits up straight in the passenger seat (she likely forgot to put her seat belt on again, and did not unless Nicholas reminded her, twice) and she puts her hand on the cupholder between the driver's seat and passenger seat. There is nothing deliberate about the gesture, but it is its impulse which tells him how much she does not want to she does not want to she does not want to because if she does
because if she does
because if
And Nicholas, he can tell how it goes to her heart, how it unthreads her a little, unstitches her and undoes her, because when she sits up like that and straightens her shoulders against the passenger seat's back and places her hand nearer him (it is meant to be nearer him, as near as she dares) and looks forward instead of out the window it is because she is resolved. She was already partly resolved.
But first:
"Do you believe they thought well of me?"
crow
It is unfair of him to concern himself so with whatever she hasn't told him about his Traditionmates. There are things (many things) that Nick hasn't yet told Pen; there are things he would tell her but has not thought to tell her, and perhaps won't because they are things he himself doesn't think about very often. There are things that she has no reason to tell him, until they come up in conversation.
Perhaps her history with Jonas and Miles is like that. Perhaps it is nothing. And yet.
And yet he cannot shake the feeling that the three of them are keeping something from him. It is unfair of him, and he knows.
So here, he senses the way his words have found their way straight to Pen's heart and buried themselves deeply there, and he says nothing more.
Except:
"I think they did," he says, his eyes glinting in the twin lights of another car that approaches them and passes in almost-silence. "The ones that matter to me did, anyway. I could tell Patricia really liked you."
lake-light
"The ones that matter to you? Which ones are those?" Pen asks, and here: she has found how to speak. Her eyes are still on the road, but it is inevitable, and it is inexorable, this pull that Nicholas has for her: she must look at him. Just not yet; she keeps herself from that.
"I met Jonas and Miles before I was Awake." Pause; precision: "Before I was fully Awake." Hesitation. "Before my brother died."
crow
"Really, anyone except Rachel or David," he says. It likely comes as no surprise, given the tension that was present between himself and Rachel there and that David, when anyone could remember him, may have struck her as somewhat unpleasant. There is a way in which his invisibility (of a sort) lends him power.
Pen speaks again, regarding Jonas and Miles, and she can see his iris appear there in the corner of his eye even though his head doesn't turn toward her. "You said that they were able to explain things to you, after." Pause. He says then, "You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to tell me, Pen."
lake-light
"You say it like that and it sounds like one thing. As if I don't want to tell you," Pen says, a pale thing poised and still watching the road spin by, shapes resolve out of the night only to fade again. Her voice is quiet but it is clear too; it would be refreshing; it would bring relief to a parched throat.
"Do you think I would make a good Chakravanti?"
crow
"I - " And Nick stops, because he feels trapped here, because he can hear her resolve emerge and then slip away again or perhaps he only imagines it. He might have clarified, then, but the question she asks him takes him aback. It's evident, there, in how he looks away from the road and over to her and then quickly back again.
"I don't know," he says, and while it is honest it is not the whole of it. Another quick look to her. "I think you...I think you care about people, and you're strong and brave and dedicated. Those are all things that make a good Chakravanti." Beat. "Why do you ask?"
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[*squint*]
Dice: 5 d10 TN4 (2, 5, 7, 7, 10) ( success x 4 )
crow
[>.>]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )
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Pen's right hand is on her thigh. The green shorts are very short and she curls her fingers in at the hem of them and is resolved and pained. Her heart hurts: the elf dart at work. They don't kill immediately.
"Because I was curious what you think." Pen was measuring his expression as echoed (Endymion, Tamuz, Crow) in the windshield: a Reflection Nicholas. Was marking the line of movement each time he glanced over at her. Her sight is clear but it is not clear enough to see anything Nicholas does not want her to see or to pull insight from his profile from the movement of his eyelids from the way he does or does not look at her from the shape of his shoulders his hands on the steering wheel.
She glances, once, away from the glass and at his face (inevitable; it was inevitable; she could not help it; she could not stop it), and then lofts her chin and looks back at the road.
Her gaze finds her knees instead of the road; heavy.
"They found me, or they were waiting, because they were hunting my brother, Heath Richard Siddal. Jonas said that my brother made a bad deal. They wanted me to tell them what I knew about him. But I was sleepwalking, you know? So I knew they were Other. And I'd been having dreams about Heath, and what was in him. What was on his back."
"And I was in the woods anyway, because he'd ... well, it wasn't all him. It's not important."
A pause. "I wanted help."
crow
It has been established that one of the disadvantages of talking while driving is that they cannot touch each other, because to do so would be irresponsible and dangerous. Out this far it is dark, black as midwinter, and his highbeams only cut out a narrow slice of moonlight for them to see by and so Nick cannot even look over at her, really.
Pen will be aware, here, of the car slowing to a stop and the tall grasses on the side of the road sway in the wind (to one side the open air, to the other side that created by the car). There is the quiet crunch of gravel as the car finally settles, and Nick shifts it into park but does not yet silence the engine.
He does this so he can look over at her, and perhaps Pen does not want this; maybe she would have preferred that Nicholas keep driving with his eyes and attention on the road so that she would not have to stand before their piercing light. Nonetheless, he does this because he cannot do otherwise. And: he is sorry, deeply so, that he was upset, and sorrowful because deep enough and it's really the same thing.
His eyes search her face; he does not know what to say at first. There are questions he could ask to which he already knows the answer, and the space to grieve he cannot quite give yet because she has not told him the entire story. What he says is, soft as shadow, "I'm sorry. I can't imagine what it must have been like for you to see them there."
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Is Pen aware that the car slows to a stop? Her vigilance is a conscious thing when she is vigilant and she is not conscious now of what there is to notice. The cadence of Nicholas's voice the undercurrents in it she listens for these she listens for him to hear him to wonder at what her name will sound like now when shaped by his voice but she does not look over at him.
He sees her gaze low, as she regards her knee through the veil of her lashes. He sees the pulse in her throat, quick under the skin. And the strong line of her jaw, the resolution there, the cameo-cut fineness of it. He sees that her eyebrows are low, and there is no brightness. The car is dark too if not so completely dark as outside the car and they are illumined by the dashboard and the kick-back from the headlights and that is all. They're in half half-light. Less than twilight. Cthonic light.
He apologizes and she drops her head back and looks up at the roof, inhaling deeply. Reaches out, with that hand laid between them, for Nicholas's knee, but takes her hand back before she touches him as if she were just grabbing at a moment and a ha here it is in her fist her closed fist can you guess where it will go next and she presses her fist to her mouth instead and flicks a sidelong glance toward him and then turns her head more fully to look at him.
"It wasn't bad, Nicholas." Imploring, her gloaming eyes dark because what other choice do they have in this light. "I'm such a fool. I should have anticipated it."
crow
This trajectory of her hand, how it moves toward him as though it would catch his knee or his thigh but instead stops, and boomerangs back around to her mouth: his eyes follow it, on its way there and back. His knee aches with what could've been memory, the imprint of an almost. After a second's hesitation he pushes up the center console, and there is a click as his seatbelt comes unlatched. She would most certainly be aware that the car has stopped now because he has slid over to her, not quite touching but very near.
"You aren't a fool. Who would have expected that?" This question is rhetorical, and also not. He leans on one hand, the one nearest the seatback, as he angles his body towards her. It's an awkward angle; there is not enough room for him over where she is. But he tries.
Nick reaches out then and touches her knee with his other hand, smoothing the span of it around the curve of the space where it meets her thigh. His hands are warm, in spite of the growing late spring evening chill imparted by the sun's disappearance. "Do you want to tell me about what happened?" Because sometimes the story, or the act of storying, helps. Sometimes it doesn't.
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She huffs air out through her nostrils at the rhetorical but not question, perhaps because it is by questions like that one Nicholas reveals that he is still a foreigner here in New England. She does look past his shoulder once, to take in their position on the shoulder (perhaps; it is almost too dark to tell) of the road, but her gaze circles back to Nicholas's face.
"You shouldn't ask that question because it has no true answer, and I only want to tell you true things, Nicholas."
His hand is warm on her knee and she does shift her legs fractionally so they cant toward Nicholas, but naught else. Her knees are cool.
"Do you want to know what happened with Heath, or what happened with me, or what happened with Jonas and Miles?"
After a spare moment, "I want you to know all my moods, and stay."
That. And stay. Two difficult words to get out past a tightness in her throat.
crow
Nick adjusts his weight, tries to wiggle a little closer where the bench narrows as it meets the central console, and his hand shifts from her her knee and over to her opposite thigh. It's all he can reach without pulling her into him, which he is still too unsure to do yet; like most people who care deeply about other people and openly demonstrate it, he often must walk the line between affection and smothering, between helpfulness and intrusiveness. Her shorts are short and so the warmth of his hand still soaks into her skin, here.
"Pen." His voice is gentle, eliciting: he responds to and stay before he answers her questions, because how can he not? "I'll be here until you tell me to go. Don't be afraid of that." His eyes hold hers, steady, because it's a sort of promise isn't it, and it's vulnerable in how open it is just now, and in its forthrightness. That is a thing more challenging for him than for her.
"I want to know all of it. As much as you want to tell me." He glances past her only briefly, out toward the field beyond. There have been no other cars, not since they slowed to a stop on the side of the road. "We have time."
lake-light
His hand shifts and her knees part and she continues to look at him (without touching him, just that cant towards, just these small reactions). Her thigh is cool, too, though not as cool as her knee, and her skin is soft and smooth there. Her eyebrows rise when he says her name so gently and her breath catches and she is thinking about how he looked when she came back from talking to Miles on the little patio. This sharpness comes into her gaze when he tells her not to be afraid. Because a sword, turned just so, will catch at light even when there is none, will display its purpose.
"Let's go to the backseat."
He's more in the middle margin than she is, so if she is going to climb over (which she is; why go outside when one doesn't have to) she has to wait for him to agree and go back there first.
"I," a spell of silence. "I don't know how to choose what to tell you first."
crow
That flash of sharpness there, and he sees it and wonders and maybe regrets: because insight and knowing what to say at all times, they're two different things, and he is always learning. There is a part of him that is relieved when Pen suggests that they move, and he slides over back toward the wheel so that she can climb over the seats and into the back.
And here, he shuts off the engine. It's a lonely road and it's late and they are safely out of the way of any oncoming traffic, and there is no point in leaving it idling for however long they will be here.
When he follows her into the backseat it is more of a tumble, really, given the size of the car and the small space he has to move through. So he does tumble, falling into the seat after her and taking only a few seconds to regain his composure before he circles an arm around her: first one and then if she moves closer to him, the other. "Start wherever it makes sense. I just want to listen and I...want to know you." He's said this before; he says it again, because sometimes people need to be reminded.
lake-light
Pen climbs over the seats and into the back. Pen slides over to give Nicholas space to fall into the backseat too. The car is close quarters. Even the backseat is close quarters but no artificial boundary there no center margin for a border. Let us not forget the graceful sweep of her diaphanous-sleeved top, the blouse-y blush pink, or how it will not stay on both shoulders the 'collar' being too wide for that the design being something that slips, revelatory, and the shoulder nearest Nicholas is the clothed one, but Pen's reflection has a naked shoulder, has shadows under the dark red of her hair, is an interesting (Medea [Circe]) composition of something half-resolved, some phantasm sketching itself into being.
How dark it is in the backseat, but also how private. When Nicholas circles an arm around her, she reaches for his waist but does not move closer. She wants to look at him though she can barely see him. Country roads. Country knights. Her eyes are sharp, though, and she can still trace his expression, pull it out of the siege, name it. Maybe name it.
Irritation bucks against her, a hard knife edge, and then: snaps, into this helplessness.
"I'm too close I don't know where it makes sense to start. I yelled at them. Every time, it seems, that I meet with Miles, when I look back I am just conscious of how ill I behaved, I never behave well to him. It is distressing."
crow
She can barely see Nicholas, and he can barely see her, though Pen is fair and the light, what light there is (the stars, the moon, a far off street light) catches more on her skin, in her hair, in her eyes. Have you, dear reader, ever taken a white pencil to paper the color of charcoal, of this black night around them, and sketched light out of that darkness? That could be Nick now, what she can see in this cthonic light: his face is defined only by a few narrow lines, the sharp cut of his nose or cheekbones or jaw being the only things that have any brightness to them.
In that, she can still read this earnest expression, this soft concern. It's that clear.
He is quiet here because he is unsure of whether he can say that she behaved ill to Miles or not. "It sounds like the times that you've met him have been hard for you," is what he says. And then, because he can sense some aspect of her irritation, because she doesn't know where it makes sense to start, he says, "Tell me about Heath."
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"Maybe it just sounds like I'm rude," Pen says, "and have no graces."
Beat. Heath.
"You would have liked him," Pen says, and she means it. "Everybody did. He was a leader of men, but he just cared about his family. He could have gone away to school, he could have done anything, but he just stayed instead."
Nicholas didn't even know her Sleeper name (thank you Jonas), but he has heard a few details about her family before, when they play question games or when it just comes up, organic. Pen does not talk about them often; it does not occur to her to talk about them often.
"I think I've told you how close we were." Pen pauses.
Maybe she hadn't. Tension whispers its way into her muscles begins to transform her from a living, pliant woman to something harder, something statue. "I went away, right, to Glasgow, and I don't know: I was there for a while. I couldn't, we couldn't really afford for me to fly back and visit except when it was absolutely necessary for the visa. We could talk on the computer sometimes, but it was hard to coordinate our schedules so we didn't get a chance all that often. Maybe once a month, sometimes twice."
"He started to seem off, and like I said, I had these dreams."
"And when I came home to visit, it was worse, Nicholas. I almost wish I'd Awakened then. I don't know if I could have helped him, I think perhaps I couldn't have, but I wish I'd Awakened then, when I went home and I saw him, I wish I could have - " Distress. "But instead there was all this half-knowing. I thought maybe he was on drugs."
"But I never really thought," and this is a whisper, "that it was so mundane. I knew. I just didn't know. There was one day when we were joking around and he hugged me and I saw something in his shadow, I flinched and he looked at me, Nick, but it wasn't him. He looked at me and he - "
Pen is peering, almost quizzically, through the darkness; searching, questing, hunting, looking. She falls silent for a moment.
Then she shakes her head. Touches her throat. "It was so bad. I kept wondering if I should stay instead of going back. The other kids, they knew something was up with him too, but they didn't know him like me and I think it happened so gradually and in front of them that they didn't really realize it. I didn't know where to go for help. I was trying to figure it out. It's the worst thing, because sometimes he was himself, but better than himself. Heath was so caring, so concerned with doing the right thing, you know? He was really good at making people feel like being alive meant something, that he was glad they were alive. He'd make you feel like you were a wonder, or part of wonder."
crow
There is this little point of tension there between his brows as he listens. He knew, the moment Pen mentioned that Jonas and Miles were hunting her brother, that there was only one possible ending to this story. Pen cannot know, but Nick knows the sorts of things Jonas and Miles hunt, he knows where they've been and what they've done.
It's a troubled thing, this expression. For Pen, and because even with as empathic and careful of other people as Nick is, he doesn't always think of the impact the Work his Tradition does often leaves on real people. (He will, from this and from other things. This, too, will shape the man he will become one day not so long from now.)
One arm, the one looped behind her, tightens around her just slightly. "It sounds like you and he had a lot in common," Nick says, his voice still soft. He expects her to deny this, and yet still says it; perhaps she will not or perhaps she will not have the energy to do so. "I think I would have liked him a lot."
lake-light
"His shadow could do things. Before the end. It could kill things." Pen is speaking deliberately, and quietly. Things can't be killed. Animals and people can be.
"I went back to Glasgow. And then I'm getting messages about Heath, and they've found something, and he's dead. When I come back home, I hear about this car wreck he survived before, and how when it's time it's time, and poor Heath. How he must've been given extra time because nothing should've been able to survive the wreck. He was dead, and I knew. I knew I knew."
"Because Jonas and Miles: I told you, they wanted me to tell them about him. I would not. Not until they told me about him. That was the whole conversation: me trying to get them to tell me why or what they knew and them trying to get me to tell them about Heath. Miles was sad and he kept apologizing or being understanding, I just hated it. Jonas was more to the point. About the bad deal, about possession. I knew - I could tell that they were honest about helping him. I could tell - I was pretty sure, even before he said so later on, that Jonas thought helping was going to be the same as killing, but that - "
Pen doesn't want to say, even now, that part of her thought that was okay (necessary), and she rears back from it recoils hard.
What this looks like now is just: a slow comb of her fingers through her hair, holding it all up in one mass, letting her gaze slip over to meet Nicholas's. She must learn to be unflinching; she thinks she must learn this.
She wants to.
"I told them to watch out for his shadow. Before I left. And other things, too. I should have just treated them like a couple of madmen, but I didn't, and I knew what they were going to do. I didn't tell Heath, either."
"I didn't Awaken for another year, two years. I dropped out of school though. I couldn't. It was a pretty bad time. Eventually, I woke up all the way, and after I did, after a few things had happened, I decided to find Jonas and Miles again."
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ooc: ahem, in that last line of repetitiveness, it should read, "Eventually, I did wake up all the way, and after I did," etc.
crow
Nick: he's had pretty involved conversations with both Miles and Jonas. They were there upon his initiation into the Tradition, when he was drowned. Of the people she met at the chantry tonight, he may be the person who knows the most about either or both of them, other than Patricia. For some reason or other, they have considered him trustworthy, they believe he has a firm place within the Tradition in spite of his lack of martial skill and they have indulged him with stories.
But not this one.
He draws in a breath and holds it there (Jonas thought helping was going to be the same as killing but that - ) and releases as she meets his gaze. That point between his eyebrows has deepened. He moves his fingertips in slow circles over her back, between her shoulderblades, rustling them through the petals on her shirt.
"I had no idea," he says. He has glanced away from her, out into the field beyond, or what would be the field beyond if he could see it. Just now it's only the night. "Some part of you knew they were telling the truth, and what was happening. I'm sorry that it happened in a way that left you feeling responsible." And the words are important, and his tone is important: he does not believe she is.
A beat. "I think if there'd been any way to save him, they would have. Not everyone in the Tradition would, but I think they would have."
He doesn't know what else to say, so his arms tighten around her, drawing her closer to him.
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"I think so too. After I woke up, I figured a lot of stuff out."
He has drawn her closer to him and she does not resist this any more than the sea resists something it cannot see in the heavens. Pen is honest and Pen, well, she wants to help people, but things like Elliot, once she has ascertained cannot be helped likely by anybody or anything she knows, she: is a soldier. "And I have a responsibility," she says, carefully, trying to address his tone of voice. He does not believe she is responsible. Pen believes she is responsible for her part, small though it was.
"I think Miles was surprised when I found him again. A little. That I wanted to. It was strange." Thinking about it: whisper of tension, again. "Jonas - " Hesitate. "He wasn't surprised."
Then with a strange undercurrent of defiance: "I like Jonas." The word 'like' is strange: it is not quite the right word, but it is close enough. "He feels - comfortable to me. Not content comfortable, but ... worn - comfortable. Practiced? An ease of movement, something." The word 'comfortable' does not satisfy Pen either. "Settled. Something."
What had she told Jonas, before decidedly changing the subject? That she feels strongly for him: she has no better descriptor of it now, though she tries for Nicholas's sake.
"But I went my way. I meant to keep up, but I didn't."
Pen suddenly: puts her hands on Nicholas, slipping them up and underneath his shirt. She prefers the skin to skin contact. Adjusts so she is leaning hard on Nicholas, would press him back onto the seat if she could.
"And you see, I am a fool for not anticipating."
crow
That defiance, it makes Nick smile a little. Perhaps she can see the small hill it makes of his cheek in what little light remains. "I like him too," he says, though for him too it is perhaps not the right word, but close enough. "He's reached a place of acceptance, I think." So much so that when others try to tend to him it sometimes feels as though he merely indulges them, understanding that they do it for their own sake as much as or more so than his. (Sometimes feelings, they're right on the mark.)
They've had conversations about this, Nick and Jonas. Jonas said -
Well, it doesn't matter what he said. Not tonight. But it was the point at which Nick decided he liked him.
Pen reaches up under his shirt then, pushes him against the seatback, and Nick leans his head back to look at her for a moment, whatever of her he can see. The arm around her tightens, fastens her there. "I suppose it would have helped if I had ever named any of the people I spoke of to you." A beat. "I'm sorry if I seemed upset, earlier. I should have known that...well, that there was something there. I shouldn't have pressured you to talk about it."
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"You'd know better than I would. But that's not what I meant by - " and she is ineloquent. Frustrated by it, but isn't really important. Some thoughts are like blowing glass, when they're still too molten when they're not quite fully fashioned trying to pause them though they're bright though they're beguiling they're ardent will only break them and one will have to begin again.
And Penelope has put her hands on him, and she has pushed him back down, and his arm has tightened as to take her down too, so she is right there over him: sprawled across, this narrow suspended place, and Pen regards the darkness of Nicholas's eyes with her head lowered. Her heart is still beating quickly.
"You were upset earlier. Was it just when I left to talk to Miles? Why? Did you think I was…" Pen trails away because she honestly cannot guess it, and this in spite of what she saw in his eyes when she returned. "Did you think I was conspiring?"
crow
There's not quite enough room for him to stretch out in the back seat; he nestles in against the seat back as much as he can, and his legs are curled up at the end against the door. It somehow manages to be comfortable though for the time being, with her weight on top of him and her hands against his skin.
He has to consider his answer, and while he does this he is considering her, this lingering look. After seconds he looks away and reaches up and unbuttons the top few buttons of his shirt, works his way down so that as long as she's there it'll be out of the way, he won't have the fabric bunched up between them. It isn't sexual (though it would certainly look that way to any cop who happened to do a well check on their stopped vehicle here - luckily the place is remote), more a concession to the desire for closeness.
"No," he says finally. "I just...I felt like something was being kept from me, or like I was the last to know about something important. I don't have a good reason for it. There was no reason I would expect you to have told me. I just..." A beat. "I'm sorry."
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"Thank you. I wanted to," a pause. Pen glances away; out the window; into the nothing that is pressing close.
"I don't tell anybody that part, of being almost awake and meeting two otherworldly hunters on the road." Her smile is spare; lovely, but in the dark isn't it all suggestion anyway? Sad? Who is to say?
"My name, that part of my name, is Elaine Penrose Siddal."
Penelope (Elaine) runs her palms up Nicholas's ribs, over his chest and his nipples, to his collar and his shoulders; then she measures the same journey back. Careful reverence in it, contemplative study in it.
"I'm sorry, too, Nicholas."
crow
"I'm glad you told me," he says. "You have nothing to be sorry for."
His eyes have fallen shut as she's let her hands smooth over the plains and contours of his skin, the shallow dip at his breastbone (he is not muscular) and the sparse scattering of dark hair there, the impression of his ribs.
Her offering of her name, that part of her name, makes him wish as though he had another to offer, but of course he does not. "It's a pretty name," he says, and: he is still processing, this story about her brother. All that it tells him about her, and how little it changes anything.
"Do you ever wonder if maybe you Awakened before you think you did?"
lake-light
"No."
Pen's dark sharp eyes can see when his fall shut in the dark. The backseat is cramped and her leg aches the one with the bruise and she shifts so that her shoulder rests against the front seat helps his arm find her waist to keep her anchored and it's somehow comfortable this dichotomy of tensions because if she were to sit back she would have more seat be less in danger of falling but then she wouldn't be leaning over Nicholas and that's what she wants to do (they'd paint her. Even cynical cops, maybe they'd see the echo or guess at it) but there's something about the suspension. Her eyes fall shut a moment after because: it's been, after all, a wearying afternoon, and there is an immediacy comes to the sense of touch when the lights are out and there is no vision at all, something her ardent heart is glad to express, and it is curious to know Nicholas (anybody) just by voice and by shape and by warmth. This is one of the true things about Penelope: she means it, whatever she says or does.
"I do think that I was an Aware child, and that perhaps I skimmed close to the surface throughout my teens. But when I Awakened, I was Awake. It felt different; it was a moment of rightness. It's tricky, Nicholas. I have thought that perhaps that whole year was a prologue, and I was just slow. But the point I consider my Awakening, it was - well it was a culmination. I couldn't have gone on, just wondering."
crow
For a moment, Nicholas does not say anything. One of his arms is keeping her anchored there on top of him, and the other hand is smoothing over the outside of her thigh: might've been her back, ordinarily, or perhaps her shoulders, but as lovely as the petals on her shirt are they are in the way for such things. He has opened his eyes again, and here she makes the slightest of impressions against the window and the fields beyond as she leans over him in this hallowed dark.
"What was yours like?"
lake-light
"Big," Pen says. Her eyes are still shut; she is trying to catch the nuance in his voice. Does he sound different in the dark?
"Dazzling. I'll tell you about it in more detail some time, if you want to hear, but I've talked about myself a lot now. I'd like it if you told me something I don't know."
And how good is Nicholas at catching nuance in a voice as clear as Penelope's, as intimate and as full of some quickening thing?
crow
In the dark: perhaps she can catch a bit of nuance. Nick's voice, a tenor, has the sort of rich timbre of someone who talks for a living, and his words are fluid and decisive when he isn't being asked to talk about himself. She could hear some wonder in his voice as he asked her a question, and hesitation too. Some thoughtfulness.
And here: Nick is good at catching nuance. We know this. Perhaps this nuance he catches makes him wonder if this is a leading statement, and maybe his heart quickens a little (can she feel it there, beneath her palm?) "I..."
He stops. Starts. "Is there something specific you're curious about?"
lake-light
"No," she says, and there isn't. She only wants (this is the nuance, there; this is the quickening) to know.
"Do you need me to name something specific?" Her eyes open; they are no longer adjusted to the dark, and though she can see the vague shape of him, it remains vague for a moment and then another moment, resolving slowly.
crow
Here's something: Nick knows what she wants to know. He knew moments ago, and yet the knowing is not enough. It surprises him, how the knowing is not enough here, how he is still afraid that he will be wrong or that what he says will come out mangled and ridiculous. "No," he says, because he doesn't.
He wants her to name something specific, because it would be easier, but it is unfair to expect bravery always from the other person. And so Nicholas steels himself, and he feels it all the way down in the tightening of his gut. "I love you," he says finally, "and all of your moods, and umm how you smile like you went and caught the moon and brought it back for me. And even when you cry how you sit with it and don't flinch or dash it away. Your bravery and your passion," he finishes.
And then there is a slow exhale, because he spoke too quickly. "But maybe you knew that already."
lake-light
He is resolving because her eyes are adjusting to the minimalist owl light: that which gives them suggestions of shape, turns Nicholas into a chiaroscuro sketch, Penelope into some half-finished Pre-Raphaelite working with only a few lines of color. He is resolving himself and maybe Penelope can feel it under her hands. How tension slips in: tightens. For what feels like a long time he's quiet and she's about to name something anyway, when he tells her that he loves her, and she is arrested - neatly, utterly. Perhaps the darkness is kind, because he can't see the rapid passage of emotion in her gaze. Perhaps it is cruel. The question will never resolve.
He gets to and umm how you smile and what do you think: this unbidden, unrestrained smile, this lake-light thing, more ardent even, and speaking of quickening, speaking of warmth - the whole of her heart and she doesn't even realize that she is smiling though she feels candescent with it, but she is, takes her left hand from Nicholas curled into a fist to press against her mouth her shoulders gone up too, lick of awareness up her spine, sitting straight, and it is certainly cruel: the dark. Or jealous, anyway. Pen takes her fist from her mouth presses it briefly to her brow, bending her head, shoulders still up, so - her voice is caught.
Big, she feels, and: Dazzling.
Pen sweeps her hand through her hair, a narrow gesture, just from her temple to around her ear. Then she puts that hand back on him, splaying her fingers over his heart. Her other hand travels up until it finds his face; her thumb, his cheekbone; her fingers, his jaw and then his earlobe.
"I love you," Pen says, deliberate, and because she thinks Nicholas would want to hear it said aloud. (He already knew it, surely. Everybody with eyes to see already knew it.) And then she kisses him full on the mouth.
crow
The night is kind to Nicholas tonight in that he cannot see the shift in Penelope's eyes, in the set of her mouth. He cannot second guess himself, is feeling too raw and too open for sorrow's precursor to pang sharply in his heart before she smiles, and this sort of smile shines through all of the darkness surrounding them. Everybody with eyes to see already knew it, and Nick certainly has eyes, and insight, and yet: these are the sort of things one second guesses. She could have denied it, or he could have been wrong, or she could have pushed back; see, it still took him effort.
So her hand against his breastbone is a relief, when it settles, and the other hand on his face makes his eyes fall shut.
He feels expansive: name a thing and he could be part of it, this soft stillness that has taken root in the hollow of his chest blooming outward.
Pen kisses him full on the mouth, and one of his hands rises to find the side of her head, his thumb neatly framing the hinge of her jaw where it meets her ear. The other cups itself underneath the back of her shirt, over her spine at the small of her back.
How long do they stay there? Well: Time, too, is mutable, and he will not be the first to break away and suggest that they make the rest of their way home. Eventually, no matter how long it is, that must happen because it must; they will rejoin the rest of the world.
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