One evening Pen does not come home until long after daybreak has become a fable told among the constellations.
Here she is, in the stair well outside their door, one hand on the wooden frame and her bright head bent as she knocks on their door. She knocks and knocks and knocks as if to wake the devil from his bed, as if to wake Spring in midwinter. Her face is in shadow, bent as it is; the bright red ravel of her hair, knotted at the base of her neck, has a graceful wave which follows the contour of her cheek and jaw and is just beginning to come un-pinned and un-tucked.
She is wearing a red bicycle jacket, unbuttoned and unclasped except see there are chains across the breast pocket and silver (metal) buttons up the side and studs following the collar.
There is a pause in the knocking, see. And then: bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang BANG BANG BANG BANG BANGBANGBANGBANG
Nick
Typically when she comes home late it is unlike Nicholas to fret overmuch. He appreciates it when they are able to make the evening into something that is shared, but there are times when life does not allow for it, and so when he went to bed and she was still not back he tried to unknot his stomach and sleep. He refrained from texting Rob, or Liz, or Thane or even Ari; there are times when sensitivity to how such things could be perceived lead him to avoid communication even when it might be prudent.
Sleep has been fitful, and has not brought him much rest at all.
In spite of that, his body and the base of his brain do not remember that concern when the hammering at their front door calls him from rest. It took him a long time to wake; it takes longer before he registers that there is some loud noise somewhere.
Somewhere.
Nicholas rolls over and pulls the blankets up around his chin. It is still dark outside, and it is fall so it is just cool enough to sleep comfortably and the blackness is like a heavy dark velvet and it does not take long before he shuts out the noise entirely.
Elaine
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 10, 10) ( success x 2 )
Elaine
BANGBANGBANGBANG. BANG. Pen rests her head against the door, then reaches for her cell phone. Her cell phone is in the left hand pocket of her jacket. There is a shining zipper there; it would shine, were there any light; it would show its gleaming teeth. The cell phone is past the teeth and she stops short of actually pulling her phone from her jacket. Her boots are the boots of someone well-used to walking through Hell, and she kicks the door and she is drained and weary: locks do not need to form a barrier for a Matter mage, but -
BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG BANGBANG BANG.
KICK KICK. BANG.
She licks her finger and begins to draw a rune, but knocks on the door after every curve. BANG BANG. BANG.
Nick
The noise will not go away; perhaps he did not dream it. Perhaps it is not just the neighbor being overenthusiastic with a new partner. Perhaps it is -
Nicholas is not sure what it is. Nicholas only wants it to go away.
He lifts his head momentarily, blinking away sleep but it is during a lull in the series of bangs (during this period when Pen begins to draw the rune.) It is only for this span of seconds, but his head finds its way back down to the pillow again, drifts more like, and settles. Its feathers call to the inky depths of his hair, dark as a crow's wing, as like calls to like, seduces it and asks it to never leave again. So he does not lift his head again, at least for a little while.
The apartment is silent as a stone.
Elaine
[Int + Enochian]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Elaine
"Son of a bitch," Pen says. Isn't living with someone supposed to make situations such as this one easier? He could still be out, Nicholas: he could be out at a bar, with Rob or with Ari. Pen gives the door another solid kick and one more frenzied (the Maenads are coming for you, Orpheus [wine-mad]) bangbangbangbangbangbang BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.
Then licks her finger and fingers scribing the rune, quickly, sloppily, Arianna would see it and perhaps she would be ashamed -- if she thought about it, perhaps Pen would be ashamed. She often wants to be better; but it is important to be adaptive too, isn't it? So:
rune scrawled, she very slowly and carefully pronounces a command in the language of angels.
[Forces 2: BLOW THE DOOR IN. I AM FLAMBEAU. NO SUBTLETY. Vulgar w/ out witnesses. Diff: 6. -3 Enochian. 3. Last little bit of willpower I WANT INSIDE.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (4, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Nick
[Alertness? -2, sleepy!]
Dice: 7 d10 TN8 (4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 1 )
Nick
Ari might have been ashamed of the rune Pen scrawled, if she saw, but when a door is blown off its hinges that sloppiness doesn't really matter, does it? No evidence.
The door is loosed from its frame and the sound is a tornado in microcosm, and the tormented wood sighs and groans as it's bent backward, as it splinters from the force of the blast. She might wonder if she's woken half the neighborhood; the smack of the knob against the wall means that she most assuredly has woken the neighbors.
A moment goes by. Someone thuds a fist or a broom handle or who knows what else against the ceiling. There is no sign of Nick.
Several more moments go by before he appears. He thought, at least, to put on pants before he went looking for a weapon. The one in hand is not aimed in her direction, but it is there in hand and it would be impossible to miss it, and he is bleary eyed and his hair a wild tangle. "Pen? What..."
Elaine
"You were home?"
Pen's voice is deliberate and her tone is molten; shocked first, lightning strike: his appearance; then the heat curls, the shadow of a wasp's stinger.
The door could be salvageable but when Pen slams it closed again, she cannot. It has been blown out of its home; one hinge held, and the motion undoes it; the door sags into the frame and will no longer fit.
"I was knocking and knocking; didn't you hear?"
Nick
He'd struggled, remember, to sleep when she was not home after a certain time; he'd laid awake and turned over a few times staring into the dark while telling himself that she was out somewhere with Rob or Ari. None of that meant that he was any easier to awaken when the time came. Her reaction and her anger do not register with him, at first. His heart begins to beat more quickly, his breath comes faster; his body recognizes her tone before his brain does, at first.
He flicks the safety back on the gun and lets his arm hang loose at his side. "I was asleep," he says. There is no note of apology, just yet. He is still too taken aback by the chain of events. "I tried to wait up for you."
Elaine
[Wits!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN8 (2, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 2 )
Nick
[Alertness? -1. Still sleepy.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (1, 1, 4, 4, 5, 5, 8) ( success x 1 )
Elaine
There are benefits to cohabiting with someone whose nature is passionate. There are also drawbacks. This is one of them: how deeply they feel is a sword that cuts both ways. Pen, she takes a deep breath, and see: she is crowned in the quality of being ardent; she is haloed by daring, strongly and (it seems) irrevocably.
"You were asleep?" Pen sounds calm; somehow, sounding calm makes it more clear that she is not. "I -- my fist was the fucking thunder; how could you not hear, even asleep?"
Her eyes are dark; seem sea-dark; fire-pit dark. They glitter.
Nick
It is an inopportune moment for Nicholas to point out that he has slept through the fucking thunder; he has slept through sirens and summer hail upon the roof and against the windows and he has slept through Pen shaking him and speaking his name. He does not point it out. His eyes are dark pools now, heavy with death draught enough to cast a likeness even if he still breathes, and she could lose herself in them if she were in a different frame of mind.
"I'm sorry," he says, because he is. "What..." He is about to question her about blowing the door down: Penny Mercury and the three little pigs. He thinks better of it. He holds his tongue.
"Did something happen?"
Elaine
[Are you holding your tongue? -_-]
Dice: 5 d10 TN4 (1, 2, 4, 6, 9) ( success x 3 )
Nick
[Why...no. >.> ]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Elaine
[-_-]
Dice: 5 d10 TN4 (5, 7, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 5 )
Nick
[ <.< ]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 6, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )
Elaine
[Restraint, Pen. Current wp!]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (2, 4) ( fail )
Nick
[Nick was definitely holding his tongue. He is still trying to piece together just what the fuck happened. He is also treading carefully because he senses she is angry with him.]
Elaine
Cool reserve, a finely balanced composure; passion, restrained: these are things Penelope strives for, and, for the most part, more often and more often, finds comes easily enough to her. She is careful of other people, and watchful in a conscious-of-being-watchful way, and she has strong ideals.
She is not cool, reserved, balanced, or composed right now. Her expression has sharpened; that wasp's stinger threat, again; a painter would paint her as one of the Furies, perhaps, or Medea: after. Medea after the romance was over; Dido, in the moment of realization: a Maenad, furious.
"Yes something happened. I needed somebody to let me in and my lover couldn't be bothered to care enough to stir his bones from our bed, no matter how hard I pounded on our door, and now the door is broken, and what the fuck. What if I needed help? What if I had texted you, not that I could have; would you have woken then? And why aren't you saying anything? Or only saying half things!"
Pen kicks the door to relieve her feelings. This does not relieve her feelings as it begins to fall; she has to catch it and slam it back into the frame.
He would be forgiven for feeling attacked; especially that last question. She was talking; how was he to say anything? Time gets confused.
Nick
[How composed are we?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Nick
The door rattles when she gives it a kick, and if the people below them have not yet rued Nick moving into her apartment they probably do now, as the thud of the door and knob against the wall reverberates through their apartment and down. Nick is still as hallowed waters, as stagnant air in a tomb, as death: except for his face, which draws up into a grimace as the stream of questions hits him punctuated by the door.
People yell at him often, throughout the day. They are not ever people he is very much in love with, and so it is more difficult for him to draw breath into the bottom of his lungs but he does, and regards her steadily. "I don't want to say anything to make you angry," he says.
If she got the sense he's still restraining himself, she'd be right. "I didn't know you were out and might need help. If I'd known, I would have stayed up later."
Elaine
Pen doesn't listen to whatever he says after he doesn't want to say anything to make her angry, because it was oil; oil is to flame as silence is to Siddal; her heart leaps (is thudding, dull and hard, she can feel her pulse) and she presses her fingertips into her temples. "So you say nothing? What am I supposed to do with nothing?"
Pen reaches as if to take her jacket off but her hand stalls; she has paced over toward the kitchen table; a diagonal line, one which doesn't take her close to Nicholas but keeps them at a distance from one another. She pivots; faces Nicholas. He is bleary, but sharp enough to notice, perhaps, an unusual thing: Pen isn't wearing any rings at all. Not even one. Her hands are pale and the knuckles raw and they're as naked as they only ever are at bed time (and even then, she often wears a ring to sleep).
Nick
Before he began his relationship with Pen, Nick would have said that his life as a counselor absolutely prepared him for having difficult conversations with other people. That was before he was ever in a relationship, before he ever had an adult fight with someone who wasn't a family member (as opposed to silently cutting ties), and now he knows: limit setting with an angry client and assertiveness training and actually having a fight with your girlfriend? Those are nothing alike.
And just what is she supposed to do with nothing? The look Nick gives her, long and level with lifted chin, is an eloquent thing, and it says that he is not sure what she will do with Something, either. "I already said I'm sorry," he says.
He has of course noticed the rings, or more specifically, the lack of rings. There is a beat in which he is torn between voicing the observation and not. Finally he says, "What happened to your rings?"
Elaine
He already said he's sorry. "Because I'm angry, not because you didn't let me in," Pen says (blames [questions?]), and her voice is tarnish dark. Listen. It has been deliberate, but now it catches and transforms into smoke. Pen knows Nick didn't do anything wrong. Pen knows that he sleeps heavily and cannot be woke easily, not even when she plies most persuasive techniques. Pen knows it is not his fault reality is punishing her. It is all her own fault. Even the broken door is her own fault. That does not make her any less angry, any less impulsive: she has crossed past the dining table and now here is the kitchen. Metal burners. Metal handle for the refrigerator, stainless steel: fuck stainless steel.
"They melted," she says.
Nick
It is probable that Penelope has not had occasion to see Nick angry yet, not truly. He has had episodes where he has been more irritable than usual, where he has kept to himself as a result; they are few and far between but they are often unpredictable, even to him. So she doesn't recognize its precursor, how still and silent he has gone, something that if given time and allowed to build would freeze and harden inside him. This is not a thing that he wants, and softening it again takes work; fortunately, his personal reserves are far greater than her own at the moment. "I did not deliberately choose not to let you in," he says. "I was asleep. But I'm here now, and I want to help you with whatever happened."
If it sounds a little clipped, perhaps he can be forgiven. There are times when love is a labor.
"What melted them?"
Elaine
[Impulse control?]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (7, 9) ( success x 2 )
Elaine
"I did! There was a sorcerer - " Pen buries the fingers of both hands in her hair and twists. The wave falling from the knot at her nape is undone further; she drags the hair-do up into a pile atop her head; a tress is liberated, her knuckles are tight, and her throat is caught. The zippers of her jacket glint like fish-scales at her wrists. Her wrists are likewise naked of adornment, and so is her chest: no slither of metal at the clavicle, only bare skin. "A snake-tongued gut-fucking dog shit sorcerer, fucking Daedalus wannabe Minotaur bag of hardened cuss, and I used quite a lot of magick, and I can't touch things with my hands, perhaps my whole body, I don't know."
Nick
More silence. She is still angry; it is just no longer at him. There is still a sting there, a welt that her words and the slamming door left behind, and he knows better than to ignore it for long. For now, though, he can; there will be another time to revisit it, to give it voice so long as he does not allow it to linger and fester as he has other old wounds. That, dear reader, will be a subject for another time and another conversation between them; we know this.
He draws in a deep breath, which seems to give buoyancy to his words and allow them to flow more naturally into one another, without the staccato break of a few moments ago. "Would you like me to help you out of your jacket?"
Elaine
"No," she says, quietly. Can he hear her? And her elbows come together, sharp points behind red leather, and her face is concealed; it is a mask. And then she drops her hands, and says, "But I can't take it off, so," Pen cannot manage not to sound haughty; imperious; drawn-up and cool, cooling, "if you would, I would be grateful."
Nick
Can he hear her?
Absolutely, he can. Here's the Ars Essentiae for you: some Words feel like being struck. As she drops her hands he is still watching her, and know that when people talk about a calm before what they actually mean is that the air is unmoving, is oppressive with the potential of the gathering storm. He is in that in-between place, and moving forward and moving back are equally unpleasant.
The gun he sets on the end table nearby, and he does it with care. Then he steps forward and pulls down the zipper on her jacket. His eyes are for the zipper at the moment, for the deep bloody red of the leather. He pulls the zipper all the way down, and then he smooths the shoulders down and away so that she can work her way out of the sleeves more easily; he holds a lapel for her so she can shrug out should she wish, and without the hazard of touching a button or the metal teeth lining a pocket.
Elaine
[Dum-dee-doo, Dex + Ath]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 5, 10, 10) ( success x 2 )
Elaine
Even with Nicholas's help it isn't easy to shrug the jacket off without brushing against any metal. Pen did not dress with an eye to avoiding metal. The opposite is usually the case. Metal means something alchemical to her, metal is incorporated symbolically into her enchantments. Metal is what swords are shaped from, when they aren't shaped from lake-light and air, from fire and moonlight: she is as pale as moonlight or chalk, the skin around her eyes thin and transparent and so there's this deep bruised look to them. It is not easy but she does it, leaves him holding it by the lapel or lets it drop to the floor.
She turns silently, holding her hair up again, so he can unhook the metal hook which is holding her dress shut, and which he will see when he reaches for it has fused together, hook to eye, so either the hook or eye needs to come out of the fabric.
Pen is silent, but: she is breathing quickly, as if she has just run a race, and her pulse is too too rapid.
Nick
Nick's own breath is coming more rapidly than usual, though he has an awareness of it, of his body, and at least is making an effort toward taking in breaths that swell his chest and force his heart to believe that everything is just as it was when he was asleep in bed and buried in his blankets. She cannot even hear him behind her as he steps around, his fingers finding the clasp of her dress.
The light is still dim in this room and so he cannot wholly see what the issue is with the clasp. He tries to unhook it first, and when this is unsuccessful he rubs clasp and hook between his thumb and forefinger, trying to find the catch. "These are fused together," he tells Pen, and there is this note of apology before he seizes the fabric between the pads of the fingers of the other hand. He begins to work the hook free of the fabric: a thing that can be done gently but devastating to the threads for all of that, between the twisting this way and that and finally the clasp comes free of the cloth that bound it.
It's a moment when he might ordinarily take every opportunity he could to be nearer, might slide an arm around her or nestle into the back of her neck, which are not things he does just now. Half of this is fear that it would be rebuffed; half is - well. Nick is prone to Jhor for a reason; he must know this, in his heart.
Elaine
The clasp is freed; so is her breath. It unspools; it is a hit, a sharp edge. Pen swallows; Nick does not use the moment to be nearer her, and perhaps he would have been rebuffed; Pen is as tense as a harp string, tuned too sharp. She pulls at the dress until the zipper (there is a zipper beneath the clasp) undoes itself. When the dress is at her hips, she jams her thumbs underneath the fabric and half-shoves half-shimmies it the rest of the way off. The boots are a challenge; one she navigates with her back to Nicholas.
She can't bring herself to say anything except, "Will you pour me a glass of water? Some seltzer if we have any."
Nick
"We have some," he says, and sensing that she had wanted privacy he had turned his eyes away as she turned her attention toward her boots. If necessary he'll assist; if not, he does not offer.
Her back is to him and so she can hear the refrigerator door opening, even if she cannot hear his footsteps on their way over to it. She can hear the bubble slosh of the water as it is set on the counter, can hear the clink of a tumbler glass as it is set on the formica next to the bottled seltzer. The water hisses as it is poured into the glass. Then the glass is extended in her direction, held there for whenever she straightens up to take it from him. "Do you need anything else?"
Elaine
"No." The word is a pomegranate seed; she slips it between her teeth; it leaves a stain on her tongue, on her lips; she has taken the glass of seltzer, bubbles rising (volcanic spring; heat will always rise; sulphur; Hell), lowers her head and glances back her mouth and jawline hidden by the lift of her shoulder. She (is proud) amends (honor), "I don't want anything. Are you going to go back to sleep?"
Nick
There are benefits to being with someone who has Nick's sensitivity and insight; like Pen and her passionate nature, it too has its drawbacks. It would be perhaps better for him and maybe her too - easier - if he would snap at her now, lay his anger and hurt out in front of the two of them and be done with it. He does not because he senses that she is proud, and that she is deeply exhausted, and compassion sometimes blurs the strict delineation that would be necessary for such a thing.
"I'm awake now." He has not poured himself a glass, but he does open the refrigerator to set the water back on the metal grate within. "But you should sleep. You sound exhausted."
Elaine
[Doo-dee-doo, ARE you angry, or do you just want to go back to bed as quickly as possible SINCE YOU LOVE BED SO MUCH MORE THAN ME and you hate me for breaking the door and I am not as good as BED? Empathy roll!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN4 (2, 4, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )
Nick
[Psh. You don't know my feelings.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )
Nick
[Anger is perhaps not the most accurate term one could use here. If it's there it's purely a reflexive kind: anger and fear are both necessary emotions, aren't they, because how would people preserve themselves without them? He might be angry but if he is it's jumbled up with so many other emotions that he is still figuring them out. He is hurt, and he is confused. He cannot imagine trying to sleep at the moment feeling like he does. Moreover: he does not know how he is supposed to act right now.]
Elaine
Pen doesn't respond immediately. Here's some immediacy: her tongue tastes of a dirty of penny, a shrill copper. Her teeth taste like lightning when her tongue scrapes past them, when she touches the tip of her tongue to her canine and bites the inside of her lip. Here's some immediacy: the intimate commitment of gray [tarnished storm's belly] eyes on Nicholas, Enchantress still, which is to say: as still as a serpent before the strike. Pen is not an easy person in her heart. In her heart Pen has very little ease.
It doesn't matter what context she has for losing her temper, or how she has lost her temper before, or how she has been angry before and with who, and how those fires have resolved themselves; it doesn't matter, the past.
Her lashes fall; veils. She looks at the bubbles skimming the surface of her seltzer, witch's brew, holds the edge of the cup against her lower lip; tremor. Then her eyes flick up once, back down, then again; stay.
"I'm not sleeping either."
Nick
The refrigerator door huffs as it shuts and seals itself, robbing the room of the light it had let spill across the linoleum floor. Nick does not look back at her immediately so he has not seen her gaze fix on him, fall and lift and fall again. His immediacy lies in the stricture of his throat as though the muscles have gone rigid in response to some noose tightening. Emotions rob him of his voice sometimes, leave him mute until he calms: and so he does not answer either, not immediately.
"Well, I'm done fighting and I don't know what you want from me, unless you would like me to retroactively have known you were going to come home at three in the morning."
Perhaps he should have, at that; Nicholas does have knowledge of Time, knows when things are going to happen before they happen. At least, sometimes he does.
Elaine
"Yes, I would like that," Pen says. Ardent, and intense. And the totality with which she feels things could warp the air, has warped her hands, the way metal reacts to her skin, has made it blister and bleed, has made it go -- just like her voice now. Listen, how it goes molten once upon a time.
"I'm sorry, you're done fighting?" The glass is slippery, condensation bleeding down the side of it. Her reflection is a half-light thing. "When did you begin? Fighting, that is, with me. I must have missed the moment."
Nick
"Do you want me to fight with you?" And here, his eyes raise to hers, and they are blank, or as close to blank as a live person's can be; removed, perhaps. There are times when Pen is opaque, is difficult to read, and there are times when Nicholas is only because wherever he is, it's not here. Perhaps this is what his clients see, sometimes.
Elaine
"Yes." It is a wonder the word is not companioned by violence. Not violence against Nicholas, necessarily, but against: some Thing, glass should shatter; lights should go out; energy needs a release. "I thought that was obvious to anybody awake and with eyes."
Nick
She says that, and mark here: he almost does. There's a flicker of something, a muscle in his cheek or his eyelid perhaps, a hint of movement as though to forecast a lash. But all he says at first is "Why?"
Elaine
"Why? Why isn't important," Pen says, and she rests her chin on top of the cup. The coolness is leeching from the cup into her palms; into her fingers; into her bones; a line of liquid is running down her wrist, following the fork of her veins, abandoning them for gravity's sake. "If you're done with something you should do it first. I'm not done with eating infants, I'm not done with - " She doesn't know. Appropriate metaphor escapes her. She'll come back to it.
Nick
"I think why is important," he says. He leans back against the countertop, which reaches just at the jut of the back of his hips, and leans back on his hands. The posture is open, and it too is a lie. There is a visible rise and fall of his chest, a swell and ease of the dimpling around his breastbone. "I would rather wait until we can both talk about it and be calm. I can't right now."
Elaine
"Why?" The lift of her eyebrows is quite imperious. Whenever somebody asks him if it is difficult, living with a Hermetic, or implies that Hermetics are more thorn than blossom, he might think of this: that cant of her chin, that lift of her eyebrows; that tone of voice.
Nick
[ughughugh]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 8) ( success x 1 )
Nick
People do ask Nick whether it's difficult to live with a Hermetic; they have and will continue to. It's true, that Hermetics perhaps often have more visible thorns than many, and they are often large and threatening. Few people imagine the same of the Chakravanti: but see here, they almost all of them to a one understand that one of the few immutable truths of existence is that everything ends, that fighting that is pointless. That struggle more often causes suffering than not.
Nick pushes himself away from the counter, and though the motion is vigorous there's no violence there; he walks a few steps and pivots and walks a few steps back the way he came, a neat little circle, and ends with himself back where he was leaned against the counter. His arms are folded now though, and he is silent, his eyes shadowed.
Elaine
Pen will feel poorly about this later. Pen often feels poorly about the moments when she is unrestrained. She throws candles at cars. She challenges people to duels. She does things she is not proud of. And once again, context: is unimportant. Now is important. Only and just this right now:
He executes a tight circle. Pen's mouth is set and demure and her lower lip somewhat out-thrust and haughtiness.
There is a version of their lives, maybe, where years in the future there is a little girl or a little boy bearing some commingling of their expressions, holding a cup just as Pen is holding the cup, but the child lets it fall: lets it break. Wide-eyed, watchful: lets it break; deliberately, and with malice aforethought.
Pen's fingers loosen, and she stares (down? [No, no]) at Nicholas.
Nick
"I don't want to say something I'm going to regret later," he says finally, though it only comes after the span of a few more breaths. His arms unfold, and his hands have a slow trajectory upward into his hair, where they rake back through his curls and stick there, like a child fighting his or her way through a bramble bush. "Just go back and go to bed, Pen. I'll be back in a little while and we can talk about it tomorrow."
Elaine
[...Hmm, and a wp here too.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (2, 3) ( fail )
Elaine
"Forfend, O Heavens!" Pen says (intense), and what is molten must eventually cool: and when it cools, sometimes it is glass. Sharpest of all, for cutting out hearts. But how it will fracture: how it will splinter, spray, fragment, shiver. "That you should know an instant's regret, or want enough to regret; stay carefully edited. We certainly don't want you to say something you're going to regret, we don't want you to act thoughtlessly for even half a fucking second; leave it all to me, Nicholas."
She does not slam the cup. She sets it down on the counter, then spins on her heel and is exactly like an arrow loosed to their bedroom and she doesn't care if the door knob is metal or was found in an antique shop it melts in her hand if she'd touched it even a second more the metal might have dripped onto the hardwood floors might have scored her when she opens the door and she leaves it misshapen.
Nick
[I need another of those too.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
Nick
Again, this restless little circuit, these rapid steps over toward the refrigerator (toward the bedroom door?) and back to the counter, but he doesn't stop there. Nick walks over to the kitchen table and seizes one of the chairs, and his hand settles on the back of the chair like a stone, curls. A flick of the wrist and he snaps it backward and away from the table, a buckling of his knees and he falls into the seat.
"Just go to bed. I don't want to talk." She might wonder if he does want to go back to sleep though, because he sounds weary. So weary.
Elaine
[Strength! With wp one cannot afford to spend.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (5, 9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Elaine
SLAM. The door shudders against its frame.
Pen doesn't say anything; she just disappears on the other side of that noise, the other side of the door, hauling the covers off of their bed in one fell swoop, collapsing an entire nest on the ground 'pon which she sinks. Her heart is beating so quickly she wishes oh she wishes oh it burns her heart turns; she curls up in the sheet-nest and stares at the door.
She is crying. She'd rather she wasn't, but she is.
There is no sound to it.
Nick
There is a part of Nick that desperately wants to have been angry, operates under the illusion that it would have calmed his heart which is thudding around inside his ribcage like a jailed bird. He too wishes and maybe it's for a different thing but there's no way to know, is there, because he didn't talk. He isn't going to talk, because how would that have looked? Nicholas can imagine rage and hurt tumbling out of him: he can imagine it would be terrible because locked inside him it feels terrible enough as it is.
He does not know what to do with himself. He sits at the table and stares at the opposite wall. He is not crying; maybe he'd rather he was.
He exhales, folds his hands upon the table, and exhales again. There is no sound to it. If it weren't for the fact that the unhinged door would make an unholy amount of noise if lifted away, she might wonder if he'd left.
Elaine
Pen does not wonder whether Nick has left. Pen wonders whether Nick will leave. She wonders this without naming it and she is curled up in her nest of sheets but she curls more tightly because she feels scraped thin and transparent because her knees can touch her chest and she mistakenly believes her heart will settle and the unsteady tattoo will slow if she does so. The salt tracks on her cheeks are brine-bright and ache raw and wet the sheets and a strand or three or four catch on the tear-tracks and stick and the shape of her mouth is misery. She wants to go back out and curl up against Nicholas so that she can feel better but she can't do that, she knows she can't do that however strong the urge, because Nicholas is the one she is fighting with, because she knows that she hurt him, she knew it before she - she doesn't think he'll come back into the bedroom and she doesn't know how to talk to someone like that, calmly, the thought of it unseats her and whips her up and makes it difficult to breathe and there's too much fucking metal in this apartment. If she had access to her cell phone she might call someone but her cellphone is guarded by zipper metal teeth in the red leather jacket which is pooled on the floor.
Nick
Nick does not think to call anyone because Nick does not know who he would call: he cannot imagine speaking with one of his cabalmates about a fight with Pen, or bothering one of his Traditionmates with it. He certainly cannot imagine calling one of his sisters, who saw him time and again turn his anger inward growing up and absorb himself every cruelty he might have wished to inflict on everything else. He almost does that now because such habits are sometimes the hardest to break, but snags his train of thought and stops it and with a sigh tips his head back so he can look out the window.
He would like to go back to bed and curl up against Pen and sleep until late in the morning, but Pen of course is in the bed and she might snap at him again. He folds his arms and lets his head drop atop them on the table, and flirts with sleep which is very much uninterested in him at the moment.
Elaine
[Regret spending that WP to slam the door, yo.]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (9) ( success x 1 )
Elaine
Pen can imagine speaking to her cabal mates about Nicholas. Ari, or Liz, or Rob, or Thane. Rob would tell her he was on Nick's side, but it would be a comfort: she could fight with Rob; the blood would flow. Thane would tell her life was full of pain; love wasn't easy, and that she should savor it. She can imagine just leaving; she can imagine leaving, but not coming back after: how she would feel; she cries for a good long time, and her nose polishes itself red and stuffed, and she rubs her cheek into the blanket again and again: there's a dark stain; it is not wine. Salt-water is an enchantment, too; a certain kind of spell. She wants to go see if Nicholas is curled up on the couch (how dare he be curled up on the couch), if he's just quietly thinking (fuming [hurt]), whether his hand is a fist or not. She wants him right now. She thinks probably if she did see him and didn't know what to say and tried to kiss him he'd push her away he'd never speak to her again she thinks probably she'd only get angry if confronted with walls of ice and try to fight again and she wishes she knew how to tell him.
She restrains herself, just barely (just barely is all she can manage), and does not go back (for round two?).
Nick
If Nick had called anyone perhaps it would have been Liz: their Chorister friend may have been more likely to swoop over and offer hugs and chocolate and a blanket and probably a distraction in the form of some ridiculous movie or other. She might have been less likely to speak at all; she might have been more likely to try to comfort both of them, either disasterously or with brilliant results. With Liz it is always one or the other. Those are the things Nick wants right now; he wants someone else to give him the things he sometimes finds it very difficult to give himself. And, well, Pen, she generally fulfills that role: but not right now.
He wants her right now, and he has no idea whether she wants him. But he did say he would be in the bedroom after her, and it has been long enough that perhaps she is asleep.
So finally he rises, and the scrape of the chair's legs against the floor is audible however faintly from within the bedroom. So is the soft click of the door coming unlatched as he opens it and peers in and over at the bed. He steps past the threshold and shuts the door behind him.
Elaine
Pen didn't turn on a light so there is no light except the glow from a night light to half-light the room (perhaps some twinkle lights cold on a wire), and she is on fire as the moon burns understand when it demolishes constellations and unbraids the milky way she is on fire as the moon is on fire and her nerves are sensitive and it isn't the sound of the chair scraping that gets her but the throw of Nick's shadow before he opens the door that has her swallowing.
The bed is still empty: when Pen dragged the sheets and blankets and pillows from the bed to make a nest, she did it with a vengeance (Fury). There is a pleasure in the pathless woods and also in building forts and tents from blankets and pillows, of using furniture as one isn't supposed to use it, in a different perspective, which is to say: she can watch his feet on the other side of the bed, feel this thorn in her heart drag a furrow, catch her breath; hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Then she reaches clumsily over to grab at one of the pillows and toss it back on top of the bed. Here.
Nick
The thrown pillow is an olive branch of sorts, an armistice; Nicholas recognizes this as he crosses the floorboards and over to it. He cannot see her there on the floor nested as she is in the blankets, and he does not lean over or walk over to her. Nick's palm finds the bed first, and then his weight settles on it, and she can see his feet still on the floor as he sits there for a moment that seems longer to both of them than it is. Some moments pull and stretch like taffy, like wool or cotton spun into yarn (like flayed hide stretched out to dry). Nick lowers himself the rest of the way then, rolls onto his stomach and pulls the pillow against his chest and under his head. He doesn't reach for blankets.
His curls twine over the pillowcase like ivy (didn't Dionysus weave grapevines into his hair?) and his muscles bunch as he tugs the pillow in tighter under his head and beneath his chin. She can hear him exhale even from where she is at on the floor.
For a little while there is silence. Then another exhale. "Do you want to come up on the bed?"
Elaine
"Yes," Pen says, and would have perhaps liked to stop there. Yes: raw, naked syllable; earnest sound, given shape by a slow air, a quick breath. But she gets ahead of herself, and has poor impulse control, which sometimes does (although her Daring doesn't) translate into recklessness. "But I can't. It is untrustworthy."
Nick
Yes, she says, and the muscles that were taught in his upper arms relax; this is only momentary, though, because there are more words to follow. Nick does not pull himself over to the edge of the bed to look down at her, though perhaps he wants to. Perhaps he wishes his impulses were less controlled. "The bed is untrustworthy?"
Elaine
"As I said."
Pen can sound aloof, can't she? It is an easy mistake to make: that tone of voice, read as distance rather than the unrestrained ache. More intensity on 'said.'
Pen closes her eyes, sharp scrape of a breath: she turns her face into the blankets and her brow jaw is tight and then she rubs her eye and stares upwards instead, breathe breathe breathe, breathe breathe breathe, don't touch anything, don't touch anything.
Nick
Pen can indeed sound aloof. Nick's heart is still stinging, red and angry and too tender and it would be easier if it would just bleed, wouldn't it? For a moment he does not answer, for a moment he feels trapped: staying silent and awake or staying silent and falling asleep or arguing with her or leaving the room again are all equally perilous decisions.
"Do you want me to go back out?" He thinks not; he thinks if she had wanted the bed she would have been on the bed when he came in. "You...you can have the bed, if you want it."
Elaine
"No!" Pen sits up, quickly enough that her head swims. She doesn't come up on the bed, but she looks over at Nicholas: his ivy-tangled curls, his Dionysus eyes if they're open, or the dark crescents of his eyelashes if they're not, and she grips the side of the bed tight. "I don't want the bed, I don't want the bed without you fucking in it, without fucking you in it, I don't want - I don't want to fight, Nick, I know I hurt you, I wish I hadn't but it hurts, I don't know how to be calm to becalm myself to be safe sailing I don't fucking know." The cadence of this: a cresting passion; hear how it rises; how it breaks, how it diminishes: evens out inexorably moving forward. "Why won't you just tell me?"
Nick
His eyes are open, and hers catch them and stick in the seconds before they wander away. There are a lot of places in the room that are half hidden right now, places the moon has not been able to touch and darkness it has not been able to burn away, and he looks there. There are a thousand reasons he could give; many of them would even be true. He is perhaps combing through all of them and that is why he doesn't answer her immediately. "It just didn't seem like a good time to tell you," he says.
To be fair: she was yelling. But Nick doesn't want to leave it there. He could seem dispassionate, Nick, and especially now but it would be a mistake to think so, and it would be a lie for him to seem so. So he adds, "I don't want to make you angry at me for being hurt. And I don't want to sound crazy. I'd rather just...I'd rather just talk about it when we're not yelling."
Elaine
He is looking elsewhere. He misses: the imploring note in her eyes, gone dark and dreamy, the beseeching shape of her mouth, lips just-parted, the misery etched in the precarious balance of her burnished head, because see: portraiture. Unhappy Woman. Understatement. She has a way of Looking, with such close and conscious Attention, with such evident hopefulness even strained and streaked by anger, that: eloquent. Eloquent face, eloquent eyes, and she doesn't need to reach out: the expression says it all. He misses it, looking away, and her elbows are on the mattress edge, and she covers her face with her hands and her head feels heavy to her is heavy to her.
"I'm not angry at you for being hurt."
Nick
He cannot look at her looking at him; he cannot possibly say what he needs to say, either, while bearing witness to her misery. It is too plainly etched on her face, and it is too easy for him to lose his own in hers. Nick rolls over onto his back, paying little mind to how the pillow bunches under the back of his head, to how the torsion yanks on his curls. His hands fold tight across his stomach, his fingers lock together. "I don't want to hurt you back. I'm afraid that if I don't stay calm that I will."
And then: he does not follow the thought, and he almost doesn't continue. "But it hurts. I don't even know - " Stop, start. "I don't even know why you're angry at me. If I'd been awake I would have come to get you."
Elaine
"I know. I just - " stop. Start. She sounds ashamed. " - I had it in my head that you, that I would get home, and then you would let me in. I couldn't drive home, I mean, the loyal steed," her nickname, sometimes, for her motorcycle, "I couldn't, because the hands, or the body I don't know, I've never had a 'dox flaw like this before. I messed it up, and then you were home the whole time," and she swallows; and tries to restrain herself; and fails. "I was just upset. And then you were upset but you wouldn't say anything, that hurts. Nicholas, that fucking hurts. That does." The heel of one palm is in one of her eyes; the fingers of her other hand have curled into a fist at the crown of her head, the wrist of it pressed against her first hand's fingers.
Nick
He looks over at her when she says she couldn't drive home, imagines her walking however far she walked leaving the motorcycle behind, in the darkest part of the night; it is not difficult for him to imagine how this could have culminated in her losing her temper as she came through the door. It does not take away the sting, but maybe it soothes it a little.
What she says next makes his eyes turn back toward the ceiling, and he is not speaking so he cannot sound ashamed, but it can be read in the twist of his mouth, in how his fingers tangle up into each other and wring. "I'm just afraid to say the wrong thing. I thought maybe I was being too sensitive and I knew you were upset and I just..." His hands have formed a ball on top of his stomach, over where they've come to rest just above his navel. "I'm afraid all the time that...that I'll say something that's just too much or I'll sound crazy, and I'll have known ahead of time I shouldn't have said it but I did anyway for some selfish reason. We're happy now and I know it can't last forever and I try to accept that but I always wonder what...what next thing I say or do, if that's going to be the thing that..."
He stops, ostensibly so he can breathe. It turns into a full stop.
Elaine
There is something he says makes her look up sharply, quickly, fire in her eyes again; the kind of fire that only comes from cities like Troy, burning in that kind of war, burning because a thousand ships were launched, burning because people want and what they want is a toy to the gods. The kind of fire Camelot went down to, in the end: there was fire; there is always fire. He finishes without her interruption; and then she creeps onto the bed and sits beside Nicholas's head, leaning hard on her fist. She wants to touch him, but she doesn't think it would be welcomed; she reaches, then pulls her hand back, up into her hair, there at the side of her neck, and the cadence of her breathing is not easy.
"So only I can bear the burden of saying the wrong thing, so I sound crazy, so I'm speaking whatever stone is going to break my heart, I say things that are just too much. Do you despise me? Do you hate me so much Nick? Do you trust me so little?"
Nick
Still his eyes are fixed on the ceiling, almost with determination. It's smooth the way ceilings in old buildings often are, without the jagged texture of many of the buildings he grew up in that were built in the 1960s and 1970s, the ones with the appearance of mini stalagmites or ripped paper. He's making careful study of it, and so he misses the conflagration, and this is part of the reason he has been looking away in the first place. He cannot watch her and know what's in her mind and still speak his own without reservation.
When he feels her weight on the bed again his eyes do meet hers again, finally. He sees how she reaches and how her hand retracts; his brows pull together and there is hesitation before he inches nearer to her, leaving the pillow behind. He hesitates, and then he scoots near enough that he can rest his arm up alongside her body, can press against her hip. He's still too unsure to reach for her himself as he might wish to.
"You never...Pen, you never...of course I don't feel that way," he says. His eyes are tracing the grain of the wood in the headboard now. "But we can't both - I mean, what if we had just started screaming at each other? What if I had said something terrible to you?"
Elaine
This is Nicholas's first meaningful relationship. This isn't Pen's. Pen's fought with people she was into before. Pen's mum on whether she loved them (not like this no). Pen's aware of her flaws, but this doesn't erase them. Earlier she was molten: luminous, hot. What was molten cooled, became glass: struck, and there was the crack. The flaws were breathed into being when she was, maybe: imperfect temper. Her heart kicks her and kicks her and she is less conscious of what he is saying than she is of his arm against her hip, the warmth of it, and she says, "Then you would have said something terrible to me," and would like to stop there, but, "Instead of merely thinking it, privately."
Nick
"I wasn't thinking terrible things about you," he says, and his voice is so quiet, so quiet that the emphasis on 'you' could go unnoticed, that maybe she'd have to have a keen ear to hear him in the first place. "I was just...I felt a lot of things and I was trying to figure out how I even felt."
He has folded his arms in front of him, and now his head comes to rest on them, turned toward the side - away from her, though. It saves him from having to look, from having to watch the effect his words have. "It just hurt not knowing what I'd done wrong. I didn't want to make it worse. And I don't want to say something you can't forgive me for."
Elaine
Pen finds she cannot speak. She pulls her legs beneath her. The mattress shifts; then she (quietly, as the lady in the ballad) stretches out beside Nicholas. She is lying on her side, and her hand hovers over his back again, then withdraws, and it is once again perhaps good that he is looking away: because she is Looking at him so beseechingly, so imploringly, with such hurt and desire; it is hard to be looked at like that. Finally she flinches and sets her hand on the small of his back, splayed, and after the splay her fingers draw together, open again right after that and she presses her face into him and breathes deep deep deep. Her cheeks are sticky, are clammy, and warm: her lashes clumped together, her lips soft.
Nick
Pen's hand finds his back, spreads out and smooths over his skin, and far from being rebuffed he rolls onto his side so that he can stretch out against her with his back against her stomach. He takes hold of her hand and folds her arm against the front of him, holds it against his chest. "I'll try to do better about talking to you," he says.
Elaine
At first she thinks she is being rebuffed, regardless: the way he turns his back to her. Pen begins to withdraw, but he takes hold of her hand and folds her arm against the front of him and that's okay she re-settles swallows opens her eyes but her lashes stick together and she has to blink rapidly in order to open her eyes truly. She re-settles; her breathing does not. It is still quick; she presses her mouth against his shoulder-blade to calm herself, then against his spine, then -
"I want you to," a hesitation. "I want you to know I want you in bad times as well as good." She winces; her voice goes low, colorless: nearly; a whisper, a scrape. "If we scream at one another, that's okay. I won't bear grudges. I'll try not to yell at you."
Misery, misery, misery. Melpomene: here's your new inspiration; Melpomene distilled into her bone-marrow, melancholy the shade of her eyes.
Nick
He doesn't have to look at her to hear how miserable she is, to sense how she is feeling. It's enough to make him roll over and around so that he can face her, so that he can pull her against his chest and tuck her head under his chin. His own misery is a quieter thing, nearly silent; her words reach him and squeeze his heart but it's hard to say whether he really believes them, yet. Maybe he wonders if she will always want him in bad times; maybe he thinks of his father, and what his father said to his mother in those years before the three of them were born, before he left for new country.
But maybe her words take root, and it's only a matter of time before belief follows desire. "I never stopped wanting you, even when you were yelling," he says. He winds one of her waves around his finger, runs his thumb over the strands. "I just want you to know that I will always come to you if I know you need me. I wish you had known that when you got home. The night was hard enough on you already."
Elaine
Pen makes a small noise when Nick rolls over to face her and she closes her eyes again when he draws her in. Pen swallows hard around: words, maybe. Clumps of them, because she is, after all and above all else, a poet, but the words: they're water-weeds, clotting around a mailed fist, they're a lost letter, and she: wants: Nicholas Hyde. So, unless he stops her (unless he does something which she believes is a sign she should stop cease ease off), she shifts nearer, slips a knee between other knees, tastes skin: open-mouthed over his pulse, where's the fire that leaps? There? And stops when he wishes, forces a breath past the clot, and words after: frees herself to say, "I know. I knew. I'm afraid it will stay and that I'll never be able to handle metal again not a cup or a knife or a guard rail without it melting through my fingers, taking the flesh with it, never be able to -- I don't want to be a dragon. Sometimes these things stay. Lysander knows somebody whose eyes are fire."
Nick
His knees yield as she moves her leg between them; the nearness of her lets him tighten his arms, which he does. The rush of blood just beneath his skin was already faster than usual and now it quickens faster still, and wind stirs trapped in his throat for a few of the beats she can feel against her lips: maybe he doesn't want her to stop. But eventually she has to breathe, and eventually she speaks, and so she does even as he is trying to chase after his next breath.
It's easy enough to catch. Her words are solemn ones. His lips press against the sharp edge of her cheekbone. "Most of the time they don't stay, and if it does I'll be here to help. Until then, we can get you some gloves."
Elaine
"Like Mickey Mouse," Penelope says, woeful and soft, soft, soft as mist on the street leading down to the sea, and she props herself up on an elbow and runs her hand along Nicholas's midline: from pyjama line to collar. She stays silent, her eyes not on his, nor even on his face, but following her hand's journey.
Nick
"I have complete confidence in your ability to make everyone else envious of your gloves," Nick says. He lets the coil of hair fall away from his finger, finally, but only so he can trace her ribs instead as they curve around to meet her spine. "What happened to the sorcerer?"
Elaine
"He ran away," Pen says, "and away he went. He will be easy enough to scry for. Knavish shithead." Heat, again; cool heat: it is when she is calm and deliberate, when she is cool radiance instead of ardence, that she is most frightening; Pen presses her hand in at his stomach, then slips her fingers beneath cloth at the hip of him: "I'm sorry I hurt you, Nicholas. It is the last thing I want to do; I'd sooner give up my shadow than give you needless hurt." In case anything is listening, the legalese of mythology: 'needless' hurt.
Nick
There is no fear in him, not of Pen and that deliberate note he can hear in her voice, steel after it has been forged and tempered and thrust into water; it's not for him. He could find it reassuring even, that Pen remains herself even exhausted, even with magick spilling out of her hands and melting all the metal it touches. He emits a soft hum, an acknowledgement and a dismissal; there is no reason to grant some knavish shithead this time of night.
Restraint can be misread for tension: maybe that's how her fingertips interpret the pull of his muscles beneath her hand. "I'm sorry I hurt you too. I'll do better at not shutting you out." A beat. "When I'm upset, that is, not because of the door. Tomorrow we should...well, I'll try to do better at texting before I go to bed." He rolls up onto an elbow then, flips over so that he can lean over her. He has one of her legs beneath him, the one she'd slid between his knees; the other he leaves free, in case she might want to pull away.
He's watching her, thoughtful and attentive and intent, and the way the sliver of moonlight slants through the window into his eyes makes them clear too, the way nightfires are clear near the bottom where they burn hottest. "I want you. I want to figure the rest out tomorrow."
Elaine
[FIGHT CONCLUDED. FOR NOW.]
