Neither Andrés nor Nick are overly familiar with the layout of downtown Denver yet, so when Andrés picked a bar for them to go to, it happened to be a purely random occurrence. One could get the impression that this is how the Etherite does most things. When Pen pulls up outside, there are people wandering up and down the sidewalks; it is a Thursday night, a thirsty night for a lot of people, and outside the bar there are glass lights strung up.
The bar itself is fairly nondescript, as far as bars go. Brick. Solid. You know: a bar. Nick is waiting outside, near his car in the parking lot. He is swaying a little, shifting his weight from foot to foot as he waits. It's gotten cold but his jacket is draped over his arm; he's still in the dark grey wool dress pants, white shirt (thankfully unsoiled) and light brown belt that he wore to work. His head twists around occasionally to observe stars, or people in windows, or passersby; given that this is something Nick does all the time, it is not necessarily an indication of how drunk or not drunk he is.
Pen
Pen spends her days doing who knows what. One of those who knows what things has resulted in this elderly black man with silver threading his beard and hair dropping her off outside the bar Nicholas is at. Hopefully, it is the right bar! They have a brief conversation, but Pen knows this is right; she can surely feel the familiar wash of hallowed, sacrosanct, reverence, and her eyesight always was particularly sharp. There he is; her ride takes off and she, casting a watchful glance around the parking lot, cuts straight toward Nick.
"If it isn't Nicholas, as I throw a shadow and devour air!" she says, when she is near enough. Penelope Mars for 'hey, dear.'
Nick
He lacks her poetry, but sometimes will mirror her sentence structure. "If it isn't Penelope, as I...fuck." Hand goes to to the temple. Nick turns to face her, and he is not so drunk that he is unsteady on his feet, but there is a flush there in his cheeks and a languor to his limbs that suggests that asking her to come get him was the right call.
He smiles at her for what is probably a moment or two too long. Then, "I am so glad to see you. I tried to keep up with Andrés and it was the worst idea I have ever had, Pen."
Pen
"No it's not," Pen states, with the easy confidence of someone who can think of two or three or five worst ideas Nicholas has had. "It cannot be; not the worst." She has reached him now, has one hand slipped in the back pocket of her pants, the other finds a lock of Nicholas's hair and flicks it, pausing so the backs of her fingers can linger on his brow. Darling man. "Did Andrés make it home or is he passed out somewhere inside? Give me your keys."
Nick
Pen steps closer to him and he grins, the sort of wide flash of teeth that is something of a foreigner to his face. He steps closer too, closes the gap between them very quickly, and his embrace is tight and accompanied by the sort of rocking off-balance motion she'll use with Ari the next night. He's glad to see her; relieved even. "He said," Nick says against her shoulder, "that he was going to drink more and he had some sort of magick - no no, he was very insistent on Science - science pill that he was going to use."
Nick's keys are in his coat pocket; his coat is draped over his arm, which is around Pen. He fumbles for the keys. It takes a long time, and after a moment he pulls away so he can reach around for them and, finally, hand them to her.
Pen
Pen makes a sound; a still born surprised (amused [burnished]) hello! for how quick and tight and rocking off-balance Nicholas's embrace is. She takes her hand from her back pocket to wrap her arm around him, too, though it is more his shoulders and then that hand up from his shoulderblade to the back of his neck. "I'm glad to see you, Nickolai.
"How unimaginative and tasteless a 'science pill' sounds," Pen says, and okay: there is a ripple of laughter in her voice, if not in her expression. While he is fumbling, but before he has pulled back to actually find his keys, Pen says, "Was he disparaging of magick then; did you play a drinking game?"
She is about to help him find the keys - she can feel the weight of them when the coat bumps against her - when Nick digs around and finally hands them to her anyway. She unlocks the car, beep beep. Or locks it again if it were left unlocked to begin with.
Nick
"He got very offended when I implied he did magick," Nick says, and the wrinkling of his nose implies that he feels very similarly about 'science pills.' Her question, Nick takes a moment to answer. He is pulling his coat back on (of course now that they are getting in the car and he will no longer be outside in the chill.)
The car unlocks with a chirp, and Nick opens the door and flops down in the seat, largely without ceremony. As he fumbles for his seatbelt he says, "It wasn't a drinking game. He asked...why I went into end-of-life counseling, and he was hitting it pretty hard, you know, tequila with every beer. 'S one of those questions people don't ask me without purpose. We just talked a lot. Then I had tequila and it tasted like middle school and regret, and he told me to go home."
Pen
"You're drinking moisture distilled from used grave when you drink tequila," Pen says, solemnly. "Where do you think the worm comes from?" And then - she hasn't yet gotten into the car, hesitating outside to cast a look back toward the bar. "Is he all right? Should I go in and try to get him to come home with us?"
Pen
ooc: ahem, from a used grave, that is
Nick
"What? Is that real?" In response to what she says about a used grave. The look he gives her is disbelieving, perhaps even a little suspicious: this is the kind of thing he would make up to tease Pen. "I tried to get him to come home with us already. He said no." A beat. "I think he's okay, kind of. Just..."
Nick sighs and knots his fingers in his hair at the back. "We talked about Eloise some. Hinata. I think it was on his mind anyway." Beat. "I think he is as okay as he wants to be right now. Can be. Anyway, he told me to go home."
Pen
"Oh." Long pause; Pen is still debating whether or not she is going to go in and drag Andrés out.
For whatever reason, she decides not to go inside. But it takes a moment, maybe two. Three. Instead, she gets into the driver's seat, shuts the door (slam! enthusiasm!), and starts the engine.
"Hey, Nick. I forget. Did Andrés tell you to go somewhere?" The air of absolute innocence is complete.
Nick
It's complete, and Nick misses it, or at the very least takes it at face value. He is slumped back in the passenger seat, boneless, his chin and jaw disappearing into the collar of his coat, leaving his nose and eyes (and hair, lots of hair) the main things that're visible. "He said 'go home to your wife before you get drunk under the table' and then told me he was going to use the terrible science pill."
A beat. "I said that already. Didn't I say that already?"
Pen
"No." Pen flips on the heat, holds her fingers in front of it for a moment, and then: all the usual hazards of a bar parking lot apply. Drunk people. Making out people. Belligerent people, in groups. Groups of smokers who just won't fucking move.
"Are you okay?"
Nick
Steering out of the parking lot, and down the rather crowded street, is like something of an obstacle course where the price for misstep is a lot of insurance payments and a possible felony. Still: Pen is Flambeau, brave at heart and steely of nerve.
"I'm okay," Nick says; and he does seem to be. Somber, perhaps, or at least moreso than he was moments before, but it's a somber topic. "I just...you know. I was worried about him. Sad for him. And it makes you think what it would be like."
Pen
"'meet me
where the sun goes down
meet me
in the cave, under the battle ground
meet me
as my lover, as my only friend
meet me
on the river bed.'" Pen is quoting, and it isn't idle. Pen does things with languor, sometimes, or seems to affect languor; she does not allow herself idleness. "I keep wanting to ... say something to him about Eloise, but it never seems to be the right moment, or even the right moment to push through. I'm glad he talked to you about her. She was cool."
"And it won't be like anything for you and me; we will perish together like reason and logic, or dream and sleep, or whipped cream and hot chocolate!"
Nick
Nick is quiet as she quotes; he is looking in the opposite direction, at the world moving by out the window. Pen says she keeps wanting to say something, and Nick looks back at her, still thoughtful even if his thoughts are slowed at the moment. "I just told him that I knew. He mentioned her a few times and it didn't feel right to go on pretending that I didn't know. He keeps himself busy, I think, because he thinks no one will notice that..."
Nick trails off, because this all speaks for itself, and anyway he has forgotten what he was originally going to say. But Pen: she says like reason and logic, or dream and sleep, and he smiles. "That's the only way I would want it to be."
Pen
"There is no reason at all your want should not be translated into reality, when the time comes," Pen says, not without a pang of conscience. Pen assumes, has perhaps always assumed, that she will die before Nicholas. She shouldn't assume that. He is Euthanatos. Chakravanti. Whatever they're calling themselves now, Horace Lysander switched between the two names, and as a Disparate Pen ran into those who called themselves either
Nick
Nicholas: he hasn't made this assumption. He is Chakravanti, and even though his day-to-day Work is often the bloodless kind, a part of him is aware of how many of his Traditionmates are frequently dispatched by their own. "If something happened to me," he says finally, "I would...I don't know. I mean I would want you to do whatever you wanted, without consideration for what I would want."
He is not expressing himself eloquently, not with this and not while drunk; still, he tugs at his lower lip in thought.
Pen
Pen is silent for a moment. Her grip on the steering wheel has tightened, and she has not meant it to tighten. Squeeze, and then relax. Turn. Hit a red light; idle. Pen is never idle. "When something happens to me, I want to become a constellation everybody knows; make sure you see to it, hmm? But I won't be one of those constellations nobody can find. I want to be more clear to a pack of Girl Scouts than is Orion's starry belt."
Brief pause. "Nicholas." Longer pause.
Nick
Pen tells him what she wants, and Nick smiles again. It's touched with wistfulness. These are conversations Nick is always immersed in: what do you want to happen to you after you die. What do you want for your family. What haven't you done, what would you like to do. That does not make it easier when the conversation is personal.
He is quiet for a moment, again, and perhaps he is thinking about what he wants: what he would have to do to keep this life from burdening his next. Whether that is even possible. Then Pen says his name, and he looks back over at her. "Yes?"
Pen
"I think - "
Beat. Pen's eyes flick toward Nicholas, then back to the road. A daring driver, Pen, even now with this conversation; but she keeps her eyes on the road.
"Every grief is its own grief. We aren't grieving yet; there's no reason to borrow what the future will give us willingly. Unless, perhaps, to feel the present more keenly - right? I will be desolated when you are dead;" there is ferocity, here, but it is tempered ferocity; the metal has already been beaten into a killing shape. "Knowing some aspect of you will continue on will not be a comfort to me, because you might not be mine then and you are mine now and I want you to be always mine. Hubris, whatever."
"I love you now. I am happy that I get to love you now." Her mouth curls. "I will love you even when I am stars; even if I become a rock. And that isn't important; that I can kiss you right now, if I wanted to, is. Whatever happens, it will all continue."
"What do you want?"
Nick
He listens, and there is a muscle at the hinge of his jaw which tightens, which springs into sharp relief; in the half light emitted by the car's console and passing street lights he looks as though he were rough hewn from stone (marble, perhaps.) There are things that she says that he knows: he might've said, earlier, we're not dead yet. He did not.
"I want to stop worrying about what the right thing is," he says, and stops, because wanting a negative: it's not the same as wanting. He reminds other people of this. "I want you, for as long as I have you. I want you after that. I want to know, for the sake of knowing. I want every experience this world and the one past it has to offer me. I want to not care about consequences." He has been thinking about this: the words have yet to be polished, but they're there.
Pen
Pen squeezes Nicholas's knee (hard), pats his thigh, uses that hand to dramatically compass the dark street before them. "Then pick a direction - I'll drive us that way until we reach something lovely." Flop of hand back to steering wheel; shit, shit shit shit that is about to turn red: zoom!
"We can get tacos first. Are there any taco places open? I want tacos."
Her voice is deeply musing.
Nick
He has drawn in a deep breath; his words had been rapid, pressured, and when he lays his hand over hers she can feel some tension there beneath his skin. He doesn't smile at what she says, not yet; words have weight, and sometimes their materialization is jarring.
He looks at her sidelong when she says she wants tacos, and here he does smile. Nick went straight from work to the bar with Andrés: it's part of why the alcohol hit him so heavily. "There are always taco places open out here." He points. "There's a truck that hangs out down that way by one of the bars."
Nick's hand has wound into the hair at the back of his head again; perhaps they speed through another red light. "One of the reasons I wanted to marry you was that I loved you, and I felt like a hundred people told me it was a terrible idea," beat, a thought, "and I wanted to do it anyway. I don't want it to end, this," and he gestures, something vague enough to imply that he does not simply mean the vow itself. "And sometimes I think I shouldn't hold so tightly to it, that attachment is going to hold me back. And then I think I don't care."
He sinks into silence then, but only for a moment. "I want tacos too."
Pen
Pen tosses her head (hair), the haughty gesture unaffected and unconscious, at the specter of those who told Nicholas their marriage was a terrible idea. Those people (Vivienne) can just be invited to their Golden Wedding Anniversary and choke on whatever delightful food is served, no, conjured, because they'll both be Archmages by then. Jerks.
Pen doesn't stop at the taco truck which lurks outside bars, sustenance for the cheap. The course she sets is: well, how is he to know what the course is? He isn't familiar with this area yet, and his thoughts are slow besides.
Silence, for a moment. And then, "I don't want you to be a hungry ghost."
Her lips stay parted, but silence.
And then, quick, quiet but definitive, "And I don't understand how... attachment can hold anybody back."
Nick
Hungry ghosts: Nick has spoken with them before. Much of his work in fact centers around preventing their existence, insofar as he can; and perhaps it never occurred to him that this was a fate that was possible for him to have. He is not unhappy, and perhaps therein lies some of his struggle to move forward. There is this quizzical look to Pen, and he says, "I've lived well. I don't think I would be hungry."
Pen's course he doesn't pretend to guess at, but he is relaxed in his seat, loose-limbed in the way of the moderately drunk. "Attachment forces us to hold on to the way things are, and closes us to the possibility of the way things could be," he says, and his voice is quiet. This is a Chakravanti teaching: it is also an Akashic teaching.
"It also means you might put some things before the Vrata. I...I've never considered that a bad thing, though." In fact, this may have saved him twice.
Pen
Drive, drive drive drive drive drive. There is a shadow on Pen's brow, or in her eyes, but her eyes are on the road and the shadow is - well, it is dark; they are driving through a winter's night toward tacos. Drive drive drive.
Nick
In most cases, Nick would not be pressed into filling a silence. He is well aware of the use of silence and pauses in conversation as a tool: they make others uneasy, and they give nothing away, and most people find them awkward and will blather on given enough space. He does it now though. His inhibitions are lowered, and he shares far more with Pen than he is inclined to share with most others to begin with.
"They told me before I was initiated that...having people in my life was going to be difficult, because people wouldn't understand. I mean," beat, "I've killed people. A lot at this point. They tell you it's not going to be easy, and that you're not going to be happy, and this implicit assumption is that it's easier to not have to make the choice. To disconnect because the alternative is so much more painful. Like...Pen, even just with you, or if we ever have kids, I don't ever want to have to make a hard choice. Some would just...choose to not have to choose."
He has Traditionmates that do not do this, and they are not necessarily the exception-not-rule, but the ones that detach from human connection even before the Quiet, or who continually struggle with it: they're not rare. "I wonder at what point we become so obsessive about the Vrata that it keeps us in place. I don't want that."
Pen
Nicholas begins to speak. Pen flicks him a quick look; the shadow on her brow is also in her eyes, their clear gray troubled - see - as the surface of a shadow radiant lake is troubled by the leading edge of rain, or maybe a wind. The scudding of clouds across the moon. The look is quick; eyes on the road, Mercury. I've killed people, he says, and her mouth is set. She straightens alertly; takes a turn. Her breathing is a very steady thing, until a longer inhale (some would just choose to not have to choose), and a hold.
He doesn't want that. Pen doesn't say anything immediately again, but her silence is different this time. Before, it was the troubled silence of someone who was absorbed trying to find the right words. Now it's just a decisive silence; gotta get to this point.
It's also blessedly brief. Pen is pulling into a parking lot now. There is a seedy looking taqueria. She kills the engine and if Nicholas begins to unbuckle reaches over to hold him in place.
"They told you; they told you. Do you believe it?"
Nick
They pull up to the taqueria, and Nick on some level has absorbed Pen's silence. There are several hurdles his thoughts must jump past now to make it to the level of conscious understanding, and so his stomach, the taut lines of his hands, they understand that her silence is a troubled thing before it has reached his neocortex. On some level perhaps he expects this, that when he talks about these things it will disturb others, that they won't find the words, and so after a certain point he does not feel the need to talk any longer.
The car rolls to a stop, and Nick goes to unbuckle his seatbelt. Pen's hand there against the thick wool padding of his coat holds him in place, and the look he gives her is one of surprise, and the moonlight and shadow lends his eyes their own mystery.
She asks him this, and he sighs. "Coming back last year was...it was really hard, Pen." Pen knows; she was there. "But I don't believe what they have told me is how it has to be. I just don't know what...anything other than that looks like." A beat. "I mean I feel like I even spent so much time when I was younger trying to be someone other than who I was before, like she's overshadowed me this whole time, that I can't even look to that. That's what they tell you to look to, is your past experience. But I'm...that person and also not. I want to believe that what I want is important, and matters, and is more than just something I need to overcome."
Pen
The car is not spacious, but it is warm (right now), cold dark all around it. Pen unbuckles her seatbelt and turns in her seat to face Nick. She keeps her hand upon him as she listens, intent as a flame on a wick, to keep him (selfishness).
"What you..." Her shoulders curve inward when she exhales like this. "I..."
It is rare for Pen to have difficulty with words; the right ones, the ones she needs in order to say what she wants to say. Pen is eloquent. That is one of the reasons the Order of Hermes sought her out, wrote her love letters, wooed her; because she could speak well of things she was passionate about.
"For myself, I have never thought of attachment as something to hold us in place. I am attached to you; I am happy with you; it does not make me want to stay. I still want to act, do, become, move forward; I just want to do it with you. I want you to act, do, become, move forward; with me. I'm not attached to a moment - " a pause; a smile, private memory of some shared sweetness perhaps. "No, that is a lie; I am attached to many moments." The smile fades. "But I am more attached to - "
"Argh, I don't know what word to use. I hate that. I hate it. I hope you don't - "
"Listen, love. Wanting is important. What you want to be, isn't that how you move in the world? And isn't it important to move in the world? To move the world, if you can? How can you leave the world better if you cut yourself off from any portion of it that is your portion of it? It's insensate; it's insensible."
These aren't idle questions. Penelope asks them carefully.
Nick
Nick doesn't shift away from her hand, hasn't yet gone to unbuckle his seatbelt. There is a sort of acceptance in the stillness of his limbs, in the way he is not trying to leave and shows no sense of urgency to do so. His relationship with Pen has always been: Nick wants Pen to know him as well as he knows her, and perhaps he expressed it in exactly these words, once long ago.
She struggles with her words, and concern has softened his expression, the muscles around his eyes. He does not rush her.
The way his eyes slant to the side and unfocus suggests that perhaps Nicholas does not have an answer to her questions, except that "You're right. I think I..." His brow furrows, at this thought that has suddenly occurred, an untangling. "I keep wanting to make sure that when I change, it's in the right way. And there's no...no risk in that."
He hesitates to say this, and the look that he gives her when he meets her eyes is somewhat abashed. "You're braver than me." He states this as fact, and to ensure it's heard as explanation not excuse, he adds, "I suppose it's just time to re-evaluate."
Pen
Pen's mouth crooks up. "I am a Flambeau," soft arrogance. Maybe humor, too. Or humor layered over a more settled sediment, arrogance. Pen wants to crawl onto Nick: wants to straddle him and talk to him that way, face to face.
So she does. Didn't she just get done saying how what you want is important? Want is another way to say 'Will.' Because she does not want him to feel trapped, considering the next question she is going to ask, she does not rest the whole of her weight on him; is readied, you see, to move.
"Would you keep yourself as quiet as the center of a stone instead of talking to me about something, because you thought I wouldn't understand it? About death, I mean, or killing, or..."
At a loss. She still doesn't have the right words.
Nick
Pen crawls onto him, and there is no indication either in his expression or in the unspoken language of of his physical shape and form that indicates that he feels trapped. He wraps an arm around her, not quite pulling her closer but holding her in place, in a way that might allow her to settle more of her weight on him. It is not a large car, and so Pen probably has to lean down, and in a way that makes this feel more private to him, shuts out the rest of the world for a few moments.
She is still struggling with her words, and Nick has allowed the back of his head to fall against his headrest so that he can look up at her. His eyes search, but they don't need to; even without the right words she's eloquent.
"Not because I thought you wouldn't understand it, Pen," he says, and his voice is a quiet thing; it can be, in here, and still be perfectly heard. "It's because I don't want you to have to." His eyes had wandered somewhere nonspecific, her collarbone or her shoulder or somewhere just past her, and now he brings them to bear again, meets her eyes. "But I suppose I can't make that decision for you."
Pen
Pen is thinking hard. Because he does not seem to feel trapped, she does settle. The front seat of a car is not a comfortable place to do this, but she is either practiced or cares not, and she looks down at Nicholas with solemnity.
Nick. Nicholas. Nickolai-o-lay, who is quiet and considered, whose skin is warm and who smells sharp of tequila and who often has an air of reserve which makes one suspect that he (hallowed be his name [reverenced be his bones] and haloed be his crown) is not quite here. Even now, he is looking just beyond her, or at her shoulder, or at her collar bone, as he conjures up an answer. When he meets her eyes -
"You can," she says, fierce; the ferocity flickers, shading into something vulnerable in that it is open, without the defense ferocity offers: "But will you?"
Nick
But will he. He hasn't looked away, even through the ferocity, even through the vulnerability that leaves him feeling vulnerable himself. "No," he says, and his hand has moved up her back, settled there between her shoulderblades. He'd like for her to be closer to him, but the car, with them face to face, is not ideal.
"I think I just got used to people not getting it when I was growing up," and old habits are hard to break. Nick sighs, and again that sharp smell of tequila, and his breath wavers a little at the end as though his body is having a hard time giving it up. "When I'm talking about having killed people, it's not like...what soldiers do. The Wheel stagnates when a lot of people die in one place, at once, so we go there. Sometimes it's just...there are a lot of people dead and dying, right? And not enough doctors, or people with sufficient knowledge of Life, and ending it is the best thing you can do for them."
A beat. "I don't regret doing it. But after a while it...it becomes routine. Banal. It doesn't even horrify you anymore." Again, this refocusing of his gaze back on her. "Are those the kinds of things you want to know?"
Pen
[Hmmm...... Dex + Ath.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )
Pen
Pen can get closer. The front seat of a car is uncomfortable with only so much space and the glove compartment just there at the back, but closer is easy. Especially if one gets closer and also reaches down to let the back drop a few inches; surprise. The glove compartment: see, it can even be used as a brace. The point: Pen can get closer, so she does.
A lot of the things she has wanted in her life have worked that way.
"Of course not. But I want to know you, and what's going on in your head, and what you are feeling, what winds are assailing you, what storms there are and clear skies too; so if that is the kind of thing that - " Beat. "I want to know you."
Nick
The back of the chair drops a few inches from behind him - surprise! It is moments like this in which it becomes clear, if it wasn't before, that Nick is not the soldier Pen is and does not exist in a state of perpetual readiness: his shock is plain on his face, and in the milliseconds after he has fallen back with her on top of him he smiles and laughs a little to himself and his gaze wanders, because he knows that was ridiculous just now, and because he is still a little drunk.
Both of his arms are around her now, holding her against him, and despite the brief diversion he has his attention on her again, on her words. His adam's apple shifts, hard, as his voice sticks. Then, "I want to let you know me. I'll try to do a better job of it."
Pen
Pen buries her face in the crook of his neck and inhales. The lingering scent of tequila and winter, certainly, but Nicholas underneath that. With her face still buried, she winds her fingers into Nicholas's black black (black is the color of my true love's) hair. "I thought - " this is, perforce, muffled.
"You are doing a fine job." Beat. The longing she feels drift on up through her body, marrow-bone to muscle to skin, tail-bone to mid-spine to cheeks, then the crown of her head, is almost a visceral thing; it causes her voice to snag, begin an unravel.
Nick
Nicholas shuts his eyes, angles his head so her face isn't closed in against his neck, and there is a long exhale that she can both hear and feel in how his chest and stomach shift beneath her weight. The fingers of one hand have found the ends of her hair, and he runs it through them; he has always liked it, the weight and color and texture which is very different from his own.
"Are you all right?" Because they've talked about Andrés, and they've talked about Nicholas, and less so Pen, and he is always keenly aware of these things.
Pen
[Lo, an empathy roll on NICK, how d'you like that? with willpower because she cares.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 5, 6) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Nick
Nick is pensive, at the moment. He seems to be thinking through a lot of what Pen has said, and her questions, and there is a lot he is trying to process internally. Also, he is concerned about her, and how the conversation might have affected her. He wants to check in. (She may also get the sense that he remembers they have not spoken of what Pen wants from Denver, yet.)
Pen
Pen kisses the side of Nick's neck once and again by his jaw, at his pulse point. Bumps her forehead against the edge of his cheekbone. Her thumb finds that same place after, when (Are you all right?) she draws back a little to study his face. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and J. W. Waterhouse often painted their Heroines bathed in a(n otherworldly) tarnished luster, and she often looks like a modern-day painting come to life: especially when that questioning light comes into her eyes, that care of precipices, threshold glamour. Her fingers loosen on Nick's hair, but only so her thumb can trace from his cheekbone to his eyebrow, then brush gently across the (close your eyes) edges of his eyelashes.
"Yes."
From eyelash to eyelid.
"I mean, I like this long argument that we are. I'm glad you speak to me, Nicholas Hyde. I," and there'd been longing, visceral, before - to break her voice; it left, but it comes back. This is hard. She doesn't want to say this, there's no reason she needs to say this at all, it could pass; it's barely part of the conversation, it's just a specter and she doesn't know why, "I just ... "
"I don't know why; I started thinking about Heath and me. After Dad,--"
Abrupt cease. And: "What you said about your past experiences, how you feel you can't look there because they are overshadowed by what you were trying not to be. I don't think I've told you much about Heath and Dad. After Dad that is." Pen starts speaking more quickly; restrains herself, forces slowness again by nuzzling back into Nicholas's neck and shoulder.
Nick
Pen's thumb brushes over his cheekbone, his eyelashes and eyelids, and there's a slight flutter there of one of his eyes; he does not open them just yet. The half light lends his high cheekbones and curling hair an ethereal quality, as though he'd be glimpsed through a copse of trees at a river's edge on the night of a full moon, there and gone again.
When Pen's voice catches his eyes open again, and they stick on hers: After Dad --
There is some slight shift in his expression when she describes his past lives, because he could clarify: like his relationship with so many other things in his past, his relationship here is complicated ground, fraught with maybes. But it doesn't linger, because there is a sort of wanting there in the way he looks at her, a concerned warmth. "I want to know you too," he says, and as she nuzzles back in against his neck he rests his cheek against the side of her head, her hair, and settles down farther into the seat.
Pen
[Current wp, ze roll!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 5, 6, 10) ( success x 2 )
Pen
"He wasn't attached to us at all until he was until he was gone. He loved us okay but he was always, I remember him well. He had a warm smile and he'd tease you but he'd, he was just always absent. Like he wanted to love us but he didn't want to be attached. But after he was gone, I mean dead; he was dead by that time, probably; we thought he was. I think it's retrospect which makes me think he was always absent; we felt the hole where he was really hard. Especially when it was filled up with - you've met my siblings. They took it really hard. Back then, I mean, but it often felt like there was something there in the dark. And I remember Heath and me, we stole - borrowed - our dad's baby cup, one of those old-fashioned silver ones? The only nice thing he had really. We took it and we went through his stuff until we found his belt," there's a simplicity to how she says his belt, like maybe there's another word supposed to go before 'belt' that she has edited out out of habit. He knows her childhood was hard knocks already. Of course they've touched on that before. It's this:
"Then we got a picture of all of us, not him but all of the rest of us, some beer, and we stole - really stole, not just borrowed - a lobster trap from Uncle Adam's dock, and some candles. And we snuck out of the house together at midnight - we told the kids we'd take care of things. They weren't sleeping, you know, and they were getting sick. He and I went out to that spot I took you last year. That wild one, overlooking the harbor; where I said the sea looked like like a film of stars? We went there and it was dead dark and I thought we were going to get dragged underground, somehow. I was scared, but really determined. And we did this ritual together, Heath and me, we made up a poem together to tell him to go away, and made a trail of candles from the sea up to the cliffs so he - he - could go up. Sometimes I think that was the first time I did any magick. Or maybe the second. I was so little though."
"Anyway, I just - I don't know why I began thinking of that moment. Heath and me, after Dad, on the cliffs, but you know..." and her voice goes low, burnished or burnishing.
Rather than finishing that sentence, picking it back up, she swallows and opens her eyes wide to stare at Nick's skin and master the telltale prickle of salt, the physical manifestation of this ache which has nothing to do with the longing, but has something to do with whatever gives the longing an edge. Wind's edge, sharp.
Nick
Nicholas listens.
She can't see his face, but if she could, there'd be a range of reactions as she speaks; but she can hear his breathing where she's at, quiet and slow, only slightly faster than it would be if he was asleep. And for both of them, there are ways in which the themes of their personal stories (they are both as myth, see, look and feel like they belong in a painting or could be called out of some ancient half-forgotten tale) twine around each other but never quite meet. And Pen is eloquent: Nick has gotten better at telling his own stories just by her example, her association.
His fingers stir on her back as she describes the way she and her brother stole her father's baby cup, slide into her hair and his fingertips find a spot at the base of her skull, where they move in slow circles. There is a deeper intake of breath once: they made a trail of candles so he could go up.
When she finishes there is a moment of silence, and his fingertips shift and circle the spot behind her ear instead. And then, finally, "Pen," and the muscles in his throat shift a little, work around the words, "are you afraid I'm going to do something like that to you?"
Pen
[Pen, project only what you wish to project right now.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 5) ( botch x 2 )
Pen
[Pen >.> burn the dice roller down.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN7 (5, 6, 6, 6) ( success x 1 ) [WP]
Denver
[Countermagick lollll.]
Dice: 10 d10 TN7 (1, 3, 3, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )
Denver
[End meta moment.]
Pen
Pen doesn't want to move. Not with Nick's fingers doing what they're doing; not with Nick beneath her as he is and warm and alive. Even as flexible as she can be, even with the seat reclined, the space they have is narrow; she does not have much freedom of movement so it would be easy to stay as she is. Comfortable; curled. The tempo of her breathing has quickened; she shakes her head. "No. I would not have married you if I thought so. No that's a lie. Yes I would have. I would have married you even if I read the portents and they told me eventually you became some monster. I would have married you even if - " she bites her tongue, literally, to stop it.
Okay. Pen wants to answer Nicholas, looking him in the eye, self-possessed and composed and deliberate, the way those old lake-witch enchantresses were when they combed out their hair, held forth the shining swords. So she schools the salt back into the sea with a blink and presses another kiss against Nick's neck, this time closer to his collar, then (another [for luck]) his adam's apple, and she pulls back so she can look him in the eye. Like so. Place her hands on his chest like so. And say, clear-voiced -
Yeah. This is where the plan breaks down. "I didn't? I don't," and she is telling the truth. She does not believe that he will do something like that to her. However, people are complex. Her voice cracks. "It's just all these idiot men who leave because they think attachment to something is going to, is what is holding them back. My father left because of that in one way, and then Heath." He's familiar with how she cries; how it doesn't usually affect her voice at all, which stays clear, but how the tears gather bright and radiant and spill spill spill; it's happening now, and there's a stitch between her brows, quiver to the nostrils and then the corners of her mouth because she doesn't want to:
Can't keep her chest from heaving, though. "He left that other way, it was different, so what different way could it be next time?" Pen reaches up and - she won't won't won't wipe away her tears - but she buries her fingers in her own hair. Unlatched, not unhinged; leave a door open and all kinds of things get in. "Why shouldn't my best friend and lover leave too? In some other way I won't even be able to see until it is completed and all our compacts are broken."
Nick
Even if -
And she stops, but he has the feeling he knows what she was going to say. She can hear his throat click when he swallows, but he does not want to move either. He does not say anything, because he knows there's more, because this is the kind of thing about which he is rarely wrong.
Pen lifts herself to look at him, and she -
Nick is familiar with how she cries. Pen is much less familiar with how he does; even (especially) men who are as attuned as Nicholas is to others' emotions, who have abandoned much of the swagger and posturing of many other men, often have difficulty with the kind of open vulnerability Pen has now. Nick's uncle once buzzed his head for this when he was eight, forced him to keep it cut short until well into his teenage years; maybe she's seen him in old photos, strangely bare and stark and staring expressionless into the camera in most of them. But his eyes flick away for a moment, and long enough to choke back the river, and then back up to her.
His hands are motionless on her waist; he also does not move to wipe away her tears. And in the rapid flutter of his eyelashes as he looks away again perhaps she can tell that there are too many things he wants to say; many of them not adequate. So instead: "I'm afraid of that too. All of that." Perhaps he wants to say more, but doesn't have the words, other than, "I want to be here with you, and move forward with you, more than anything. There is nothing that's within my power to stop that would make me leave. I promise that."
Pen
Pen digs her palms into Nicholas's chest (through heavy woolen coat, less heavy shirt beneath) and slides them upward, over his shoulders, working her fingers and splaying them behind his neck. She drops her gaze away from his; her bangs hide her face when she drops her head like that.
Deep, deep, deep breath. Then she unbuckles his seatbelt, shifting so she can do so. It slithers desultorily away. "Thank you. I know. And I worry too about ... no that's a lie as well. I don't often worry about leaving. But I should."
"It's really not fair. I didn't even have tequila."
Nick
Nick's seatbelt slides away, and if he is slow to move it's not because of the alcohol. There's a reluctance to leave these moments behind and let them pass into memory, both of them tangled up in one another and showing themselves without fear; who knows how many anyone has. He considers this and makes his peace in a span of seconds.
Pen's hair hides her face; Nick lifts a hand and his thumb traces the warrioress' curve of her jawline, and he doesn't move to raise himself back up just yet. About tequila: he smiles, and it tries to be sly, but there's still too much wistfulness there in the set of his eyebrows. "We can remedy that, you know."
Nick still does not move; he is not impatient. Though in those few moments as he waits for Pen to shift off of him, he says, "Thank you for...for telling me all of that, Pen." He stops, considers, but it's not for long; when his eyes meet hers again there's something vulnerable in them, because when he'd told her earlier that she was braver than he was: Nick, consummate liar though he may be, did not lie about that. "I really will try to tell you more."
Pen
Pen still does not wish to move. She is not one who can feel as she has felt one moment, and in the next be already free of it; that is not how ardor works and her mouth is a melancholy curve. She is thinking how much she likes Nicholas to touch her. He knows; she has written him poetry, explicit and oblique, has told him so. His thumb finds her skin wet; a tear drips from the end of her nose, and when she flicks a glance toward his up from under her bangs her expression has shifted. Pen is often open, even unto a fault, but this is not to say she is always clear. The color of her eyes is a tarnished luster, a metal after the radiance has begun to fall to deep long shadows - it is safe. The shadows are a sign that you (who) are there, looking. The look is this tender, knowing thing - maybe touched by wry. She cannot hold it when he thanks her; her mouth compresses; she glances briefly to the side, settling her hands on Nicholas's chest again, but brings her gaze to bear on his again.
"Yeah," she says. And there remains a somewhat melancholy cast to her mouth, though her eyes have warmed.
Then Pen leans forward and kisses Nicholas on the mouth, as if she'd like to forget about getting tacos, as if she'd kiss him until they longer had to think about what if and the future and the past and the past before the past and the future after the future. The glove compartment falls open; hits her on the tailbone and she winces.
This laugh sticks in her throat; it has no sound, just shape. Still she lingers over him, opens the door; lets the cold air in and shivers. She slams the glove compartment closed, and then gets out of the car.
"How many tacos do you want?" Now she wipes her face, glancing toward the taqueria. But only because she's going inside, where there will people. "Do you want to take them home or still go on a driving adventure?"
Nick
[Are you for real okay, Pen? -1 because drunk.]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 6, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 8 ) [Doubling Tens]
Pen
[Mm?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )
Pen
[Give the value of 'okay,' Mr. Hyde.
Pen is still raw and emotional. It is difficult to talk about Heath, not necessarily because she cannot think about him or the grieving process stalled, but because talking about this aspect of Heath is something she has (never) done. It is crazy difficult to talk about the pattern of leaving, the what if of it ( - and here, buried really, really deep, so she probably doesn't even know she feels this way though he with his insightful astutery might see it in her expression for a second, this acceptance that she might well deserve to be left because of reasons. This doesn't really have much to do with their conversation tonight or a lack of self-esteem - it's dormant but old guilt over some thing). There are a lot of unresolved paradoxes of feeling there.
Boils down to: it's hard to talk about something she never talks about but if she's going to talk about it with anyone (and maybe there's some relief, that she has someone she can talk about it to) yayNick, and she's sad about aspects of their conversation, but she's just sad because they're sad topics. She believes Nick's promise(s), really and truly. She trusts him. She doesn't really think she has reason to doubt her own judgment on that one. Pen is seriously fucking in love with Nick. Loves him loves him loves him an active verb. Part of her wants to jump his bones. Another part wants to just curl into him and sleep. She's a bit annoyed she hasn't done either. She's concerned about him. She wants to help. There's no worry about not knowing how -- she's pretty confident she will/can. She's just not 100% sure she did right now. Maybe 95% sure. 97%.]
Nick
Pen leans forward and kisses him, and Nick is thinking again about how much he'd like to stay, how little he'd like to move: this pattern of holding on and letting go is cyclic, sometimes rapid. He is thinking, then, about nothing at all, other than how happy he is to be right here.
Nick's laugh does not stick in his throat; Pen startles and his head drops back again and it's less of a ring just now than it is this quiet huff, this noise from the back of his throat. He tries to wiggle, very briefly, around so he can shut the glove compartment for her, but he's reclined back and can't reach and anyway he's not at his most coordinated at the moment.
His eyes linger on Pen as she moves to open the door, as she wipes her tears away, and before he answers her he catches her wrist with one hand and pushes himself up with the other so he can kiss her again. He doesn't hold it long (less to do with desire and more to do with his abs giving out), but this is ardent, as ardent as Nick ever is, and when he pulls back it's slower, and his hand lingers on her wrist.
He meets her eyes, and after a moment has passed he says, "I feel a lot better. I should do this talking it out thing more often." He says this as though it's an afterthought, though of course it isn't, and then his gaze flicks to the side out the window. "I want more tacos than I can probably eat. Three? Let's go on a driving adventure."
Nick doesn't shift away from her hand, hasn't yet gone to unbuckle his seatbelt. There is a sort of acceptance in the stillness of his limbs, in the way he is not trying to leave and shows no sense of urgency to do so. His relationship with Pen has always been: Nick wants Pen to know him as well as he knows her, and perhaps he expressed it in exactly these words, once long ago.
She struggles with her words, and concern has softened his expression, the muscles around his eyes. He does not rush her.
The way his eyes slant to the side and unfocus suggests that perhaps Nicholas does not have an answer to her questions, except that "You're right. I think I..." His brow furrows, at this thought that has suddenly occurred, an untangling. "I keep wanting to make sure that when I change, it's in the right way. And there's no...no risk in that."
He hesitates to say this, and the look that he gives her when he meets her eyes is somewhat abashed. "You're braver than me." He states this as fact, and to ensure it's heard as explanation not excuse, he adds, "I suppose it's just time to re-evaluate."
Pen
Pen's mouth crooks up. "I am a Flambeau," soft arrogance. Maybe humor, too. Or humor layered over a more settled sediment, arrogance. Pen wants to crawl onto Nick: wants to straddle him and talk to him that way, face to face.
So she does. Didn't she just get done saying how what you want is important? Want is another way to say 'Will.' Because she does not want him to feel trapped, considering the next question she is going to ask, she does not rest the whole of her weight on him; is readied, you see, to move.
"Would you keep yourself as quiet as the center of a stone instead of talking to me about something, because you thought I wouldn't understand it? About death, I mean, or killing, or..."
At a loss. She still doesn't have the right words.
Nick
Pen crawls onto him, and there is no indication either in his expression or in the unspoken language of of his physical shape and form that indicates that he feels trapped. He wraps an arm around her, not quite pulling her closer but holding her in place, in a way that might allow her to settle more of her weight on him. It is not a large car, and so Pen probably has to lean down, and in a way that makes this feel more private to him, shuts out the rest of the world for a few moments.
She is still struggling with her words, and Nick has allowed the back of his head to fall against his headrest so that he can look up at her. His eyes search, but they don't need to; even without the right words she's eloquent.
"Not because I thought you wouldn't understand it, Pen," he says, and his voice is a quiet thing; it can be, in here, and still be perfectly heard. "It's because I don't want you to have to." His eyes had wandered somewhere nonspecific, her collarbone or her shoulder or somewhere just past her, and now he brings them to bear again, meets her eyes. "But I suppose I can't make that decision for you."
Pen
Pen is thinking hard. Because he does not seem to feel trapped, she does settle. The front seat of a car is not a comfortable place to do this, but she is either practiced or cares not, and she looks down at Nicholas with solemnity.
Nick. Nicholas. Nickolai-o-lay, who is quiet and considered, whose skin is warm and who smells sharp of tequila and who often has an air of reserve which makes one suspect that he (hallowed be his name [reverenced be his bones] and haloed be his crown) is not quite here. Even now, he is looking just beyond her, or at her shoulder, or at her collar bone, as he conjures up an answer. When he meets her eyes -
"You can," she says, fierce; the ferocity flickers, shading into something vulnerable in that it is open, without the defense ferocity offers: "But will you?"
Nick
But will he. He hasn't looked away, even through the ferocity, even through the vulnerability that leaves him feeling vulnerable himself. "No," he says, and his hand has moved up her back, settled there between her shoulderblades. He'd like for her to be closer to him, but the car, with them face to face, is not ideal.
"I think I just got used to people not getting it when I was growing up," and old habits are hard to break. Nick sighs, and again that sharp smell of tequila, and his breath wavers a little at the end as though his body is having a hard time giving it up. "When I'm talking about having killed people, it's not like...what soldiers do. The Wheel stagnates when a lot of people die in one place, at once, so we go there. Sometimes it's just...there are a lot of people dead and dying, right? And not enough doctors, or people with sufficient knowledge of Life, and ending it is the best thing you can do for them."
A beat. "I don't regret doing it. But after a while it...it becomes routine. Banal. It doesn't even horrify you anymore." Again, this refocusing of his gaze back on her. "Are those the kinds of things you want to know?"
Pen
[Hmmm...... Dex + Ath.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )
Pen
Pen can get closer. The front seat of a car is uncomfortable with only so much space and the glove compartment just there at the back, but closer is easy. Especially if one gets closer and also reaches down to let the back drop a few inches; surprise. The glove compartment: see, it can even be used as a brace. The point: Pen can get closer, so she does.
A lot of the things she has wanted in her life have worked that way.
"Of course not. But I want to know you, and what's going on in your head, and what you are feeling, what winds are assailing you, what storms there are and clear skies too; so if that is the kind of thing that - " Beat. "I want to know you."
Nick
The back of the chair drops a few inches from behind him - surprise! It is moments like this in which it becomes clear, if it wasn't before, that Nick is not the soldier Pen is and does not exist in a state of perpetual readiness: his shock is plain on his face, and in the milliseconds after he has fallen back with her on top of him he smiles and laughs a little to himself and his gaze wanders, because he knows that was ridiculous just now, and because he is still a little drunk.
Both of his arms are around her now, holding her against him, and despite the brief diversion he has his attention on her again, on her words. His adam's apple shifts, hard, as his voice sticks. Then, "I want to let you know me. I'll try to do a better job of it."
Pen
Pen buries her face in the crook of his neck and inhales. The lingering scent of tequila and winter, certainly, but Nicholas underneath that. With her face still buried, she winds her fingers into Nicholas's black black (black is the color of my true love's) hair. "I thought - " this is, perforce, muffled.
"You are doing a fine job." Beat. The longing she feels drift on up through her body, marrow-bone to muscle to skin, tail-bone to mid-spine to cheeks, then the crown of her head, is almost a visceral thing; it causes her voice to snag, begin an unravel.
Nick
Nicholas shuts his eyes, angles his head so her face isn't closed in against his neck, and there is a long exhale that she can both hear and feel in how his chest and stomach shift beneath her weight. The fingers of one hand have found the ends of her hair, and he runs it through them; he has always liked it, the weight and color and texture which is very different from his own.
"Are you all right?" Because they've talked about Andrés, and they've talked about Nicholas, and less so Pen, and he is always keenly aware of these things.
Pen
[Lo, an empathy roll on NICK, how d'you like that? with willpower because she cares.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 5, 6) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Nick
Nick is pensive, at the moment. He seems to be thinking through a lot of what Pen has said, and her questions, and there is a lot he is trying to process internally. Also, he is concerned about her, and how the conversation might have affected her. He wants to check in. (She may also get the sense that he remembers they have not spoken of what Pen wants from Denver, yet.)
Pen
Pen kisses the side of Nick's neck once and again by his jaw, at his pulse point. Bumps her forehead against the edge of his cheekbone. Her thumb finds that same place after, when (Are you all right?) she draws back a little to study his face. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and J. W. Waterhouse often painted their Heroines bathed in a(n otherworldly) tarnished luster, and she often looks like a modern-day painting come to life: especially when that questioning light comes into her eyes, that care of precipices, threshold glamour. Her fingers loosen on Nick's hair, but only so her thumb can trace from his cheekbone to his eyebrow, then brush gently across the (close your eyes) edges of his eyelashes.
"Yes."
From eyelash to eyelid.
"I mean, I like this long argument that we are. I'm glad you speak to me, Nicholas Hyde. I," and there'd been longing, visceral, before - to break her voice; it left, but it comes back. This is hard. She doesn't want to say this, there's no reason she needs to say this at all, it could pass; it's barely part of the conversation, it's just a specter and she doesn't know why, "I just ... "
"I don't know why; I started thinking about Heath and me. After Dad,--"
Abrupt cease. And: "What you said about your past experiences, how you feel you can't look there because they are overshadowed by what you were trying not to be. I don't think I've told you much about Heath and Dad. After Dad that is." Pen starts speaking more quickly; restrains herself, forces slowness again by nuzzling back into Nicholas's neck and shoulder.
Nick
Pen's thumb brushes over his cheekbone, his eyelashes and eyelids, and there's a slight flutter there of one of his eyes; he does not open them just yet. The half light lends his high cheekbones and curling hair an ethereal quality, as though he'd be glimpsed through a copse of trees at a river's edge on the night of a full moon, there and gone again.
When Pen's voice catches his eyes open again, and they stick on hers: After Dad --
There is some slight shift in his expression when she describes his past lives, because he could clarify: like his relationship with so many other things in his past, his relationship here is complicated ground, fraught with maybes. But it doesn't linger, because there is a sort of wanting there in the way he looks at her, a concerned warmth. "I want to know you too," he says, and as she nuzzles back in against his neck he rests his cheek against the side of her head, her hair, and settles down farther into the seat.
Pen
[Current wp, ze roll!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 5, 6, 10) ( success x 2 )
Pen
"He wasn't attached to us at all until he was until he was gone. He loved us okay but he was always, I remember him well. He had a warm smile and he'd tease you but he'd, he was just always absent. Like he wanted to love us but he didn't want to be attached. But after he was gone, I mean dead; he was dead by that time, probably; we thought he was. I think it's retrospect which makes me think he was always absent; we felt the hole where he was really hard. Especially when it was filled up with - you've met my siblings. They took it really hard. Back then, I mean, but it often felt like there was something there in the dark. And I remember Heath and me, we stole - borrowed - our dad's baby cup, one of those old-fashioned silver ones? The only nice thing he had really. We took it and we went through his stuff until we found his belt," there's a simplicity to how she says his belt, like maybe there's another word supposed to go before 'belt' that she has edited out out of habit. He knows her childhood was hard knocks already. Of course they've touched on that before. It's this:
"Then we got a picture of all of us, not him but all of the rest of us, some beer, and we stole - really stole, not just borrowed - a lobster trap from Uncle Adam's dock, and some candles. And we snuck out of the house together at midnight - we told the kids we'd take care of things. They weren't sleeping, you know, and they were getting sick. He and I went out to that spot I took you last year. That wild one, overlooking the harbor; where I said the sea looked like like a film of stars? We went there and it was dead dark and I thought we were going to get dragged underground, somehow. I was scared, but really determined. And we did this ritual together, Heath and me, we made up a poem together to tell him to go away, and made a trail of candles from the sea up to the cliffs so he - he - could go up. Sometimes I think that was the first time I did any magick. Or maybe the second. I was so little though."
"Anyway, I just - I don't know why I began thinking of that moment. Heath and me, after Dad, on the cliffs, but you know..." and her voice goes low, burnished or burnishing.
Rather than finishing that sentence, picking it back up, she swallows and opens her eyes wide to stare at Nick's skin and master the telltale prickle of salt, the physical manifestation of this ache which has nothing to do with the longing, but has something to do with whatever gives the longing an edge. Wind's edge, sharp.
Nick
Nicholas listens.
She can't see his face, but if she could, there'd be a range of reactions as she speaks; but she can hear his breathing where she's at, quiet and slow, only slightly faster than it would be if he was asleep. And for both of them, there are ways in which the themes of their personal stories (they are both as myth, see, look and feel like they belong in a painting or could be called out of some ancient half-forgotten tale) twine around each other but never quite meet. And Pen is eloquent: Nick has gotten better at telling his own stories just by her example, her association.
His fingers stir on her back as she describes the way she and her brother stole her father's baby cup, slide into her hair and his fingertips find a spot at the base of her skull, where they move in slow circles. There is a deeper intake of breath once: they made a trail of candles so he could go up.
When she finishes there is a moment of silence, and his fingertips shift and circle the spot behind her ear instead. And then, finally, "Pen," and the muscles in his throat shift a little, work around the words, "are you afraid I'm going to do something like that to you?"
Pen
[Pen, project only what you wish to project right now.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 5) ( botch x 2 )
Pen
[Pen >.> burn the dice roller down.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN7 (5, 6, 6, 6) ( success x 1 ) [WP]
Denver
[Countermagick lollll.]
Dice: 10 d10 TN7 (1, 3, 3, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )
Denver
[End meta moment.]
Pen
Pen doesn't want to move. Not with Nick's fingers doing what they're doing; not with Nick beneath her as he is and warm and alive. Even as flexible as she can be, even with the seat reclined, the space they have is narrow; she does not have much freedom of movement so it would be easy to stay as she is. Comfortable; curled. The tempo of her breathing has quickened; she shakes her head. "No. I would not have married you if I thought so. No that's a lie. Yes I would have. I would have married you even if I read the portents and they told me eventually you became some monster. I would have married you even if - " she bites her tongue, literally, to stop it.
Okay. Pen wants to answer Nicholas, looking him in the eye, self-possessed and composed and deliberate, the way those old lake-witch enchantresses were when they combed out their hair, held forth the shining swords. So she schools the salt back into the sea with a blink and presses another kiss against Nick's neck, this time closer to his collar, then (another [for luck]) his adam's apple, and she pulls back so she can look him in the eye. Like so. Place her hands on his chest like so. And say, clear-voiced -
Yeah. This is where the plan breaks down. "I didn't? I don't," and she is telling the truth. She does not believe that he will do something like that to her. However, people are complex. Her voice cracks. "It's just all these idiot men who leave because they think attachment to something is going to, is what is holding them back. My father left because of that in one way, and then Heath." He's familiar with how she cries; how it doesn't usually affect her voice at all, which stays clear, but how the tears gather bright and radiant and spill spill spill; it's happening now, and there's a stitch between her brows, quiver to the nostrils and then the corners of her mouth because she doesn't want to:
Can't keep her chest from heaving, though. "He left that other way, it was different, so what different way could it be next time?" Pen reaches up and - she won't won't won't wipe away her tears - but she buries her fingers in her own hair. Unlatched, not unhinged; leave a door open and all kinds of things get in. "Why shouldn't my best friend and lover leave too? In some other way I won't even be able to see until it is completed and all our compacts are broken."
Nick
Even if -
And she stops, but he has the feeling he knows what she was going to say. She can hear his throat click when he swallows, but he does not want to move either. He does not say anything, because he knows there's more, because this is the kind of thing about which he is rarely wrong.
Pen lifts herself to look at him, and she -
Nick is familiar with how she cries. Pen is much less familiar with how he does; even (especially) men who are as attuned as Nicholas is to others' emotions, who have abandoned much of the swagger and posturing of many other men, often have difficulty with the kind of open vulnerability Pen has now. Nick's uncle once buzzed his head for this when he was eight, forced him to keep it cut short until well into his teenage years; maybe she's seen him in old photos, strangely bare and stark and staring expressionless into the camera in most of them. But his eyes flick away for a moment, and long enough to choke back the river, and then back up to her.
His hands are motionless on her waist; he also does not move to wipe away her tears. And in the rapid flutter of his eyelashes as he looks away again perhaps she can tell that there are too many things he wants to say; many of them not adequate. So instead: "I'm afraid of that too. All of that." Perhaps he wants to say more, but doesn't have the words, other than, "I want to be here with you, and move forward with you, more than anything. There is nothing that's within my power to stop that would make me leave. I promise that."
Pen
Pen digs her palms into Nicholas's chest (through heavy woolen coat, less heavy shirt beneath) and slides them upward, over his shoulders, working her fingers and splaying them behind his neck. She drops her gaze away from his; her bangs hide her face when she drops her head like that.
Deep, deep, deep breath. Then she unbuckles his seatbelt, shifting so she can do so. It slithers desultorily away. "Thank you. I know. And I worry too about ... no that's a lie as well. I don't often worry about leaving. But I should."
"It's really not fair. I didn't even have tequila."
Nick
Nick's seatbelt slides away, and if he is slow to move it's not because of the alcohol. There's a reluctance to leave these moments behind and let them pass into memory, both of them tangled up in one another and showing themselves without fear; who knows how many anyone has. He considers this and makes his peace in a span of seconds.
Pen's hair hides her face; Nick lifts a hand and his thumb traces the warrioress' curve of her jawline, and he doesn't move to raise himself back up just yet. About tequila: he smiles, and it tries to be sly, but there's still too much wistfulness there in the set of his eyebrows. "We can remedy that, you know."
Nick still does not move; he is not impatient. Though in those few moments as he waits for Pen to shift off of him, he says, "Thank you for...for telling me all of that, Pen." He stops, considers, but it's not for long; when his eyes meet hers again there's something vulnerable in them, because when he'd told her earlier that she was braver than he was: Nick, consummate liar though he may be, did not lie about that. "I really will try to tell you more."
Pen
Pen still does not wish to move. She is not one who can feel as she has felt one moment, and in the next be already free of it; that is not how ardor works and her mouth is a melancholy curve. She is thinking how much she likes Nicholas to touch her. He knows; she has written him poetry, explicit and oblique, has told him so. His thumb finds her skin wet; a tear drips from the end of her nose, and when she flicks a glance toward his up from under her bangs her expression has shifted. Pen is often open, even unto a fault, but this is not to say she is always clear. The color of her eyes is a tarnished luster, a metal after the radiance has begun to fall to deep long shadows - it is safe. The shadows are a sign that you (who) are there, looking. The look is this tender, knowing thing - maybe touched by wry. She cannot hold it when he thanks her; her mouth compresses; she glances briefly to the side, settling her hands on Nicholas's chest again, but brings her gaze to bear on his again.
"Yeah," she says. And there remains a somewhat melancholy cast to her mouth, though her eyes have warmed.
Then Pen leans forward and kisses Nicholas on the mouth, as if she'd like to forget about getting tacos, as if she'd kiss him until they longer had to think about what if and the future and the past and the past before the past and the future after the future. The glove compartment falls open; hits her on the tailbone and she winces.
This laugh sticks in her throat; it has no sound, just shape. Still she lingers over him, opens the door; lets the cold air in and shivers. She slams the glove compartment closed, and then gets out of the car.
"How many tacos do you want?" Now she wipes her face, glancing toward the taqueria. But only because she's going inside, where there will people. "Do you want to take them home or still go on a driving adventure?"
Nick
[Are you for real okay, Pen? -1 because drunk.]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 6, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 8 ) [Doubling Tens]
Pen
[Mm?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )
Pen
[Give the value of 'okay,' Mr. Hyde.
Pen is still raw and emotional. It is difficult to talk about Heath, not necessarily because she cannot think about him or the grieving process stalled, but because talking about this aspect of Heath is something she has (never) done. It is crazy difficult to talk about the pattern of leaving, the what if of it ( - and here, buried really, really deep, so she probably doesn't even know she feels this way though he with his insightful astutery might see it in her expression for a second, this acceptance that she might well deserve to be left because of reasons. This doesn't really have much to do with their conversation tonight or a lack of self-esteem - it's dormant but old guilt over some thing). There are a lot of unresolved paradoxes of feeling there.
Boils down to: it's hard to talk about something she never talks about but if she's going to talk about it with anyone (and maybe there's some relief, that she has someone she can talk about it to) yayNick, and she's sad about aspects of their conversation, but she's just sad because they're sad topics. She believes Nick's promise(s), really and truly. She trusts him. She doesn't really think she has reason to doubt her own judgment on that one. Pen is seriously fucking in love with Nick. Loves him loves him loves him an active verb. Part of her wants to jump his bones. Another part wants to just curl into him and sleep. She's a bit annoyed she hasn't done either. She's concerned about him. She wants to help. There's no worry about not knowing how -- she's pretty confident she will/can. She's just not 100% sure she did right now. Maybe 95% sure. 97%.]
Nick
Pen leans forward and kisses him, and Nick is thinking again about how much he'd like to stay, how little he'd like to move: this pattern of holding on and letting go is cyclic, sometimes rapid. He is thinking, then, about nothing at all, other than how happy he is to be right here.
Nick's laugh does not stick in his throat; Pen startles and his head drops back again and it's less of a ring just now than it is this quiet huff, this noise from the back of his throat. He tries to wiggle, very briefly, around so he can shut the glove compartment for her, but he's reclined back and can't reach and anyway he's not at his most coordinated at the moment.
His eyes linger on Pen as she moves to open the door, as she wipes her tears away, and before he answers her he catches her wrist with one hand and pushes himself up with the other so he can kiss her again. He doesn't hold it long (less to do with desire and more to do with his abs giving out), but this is ardent, as ardent as Nick ever is, and when he pulls back it's slower, and his hand lingers on her wrist.
He meets her eyes, and after a moment has passed he says, "I feel a lot better. I should do this talking it out thing more often." He says this as though it's an afterthought, though of course it isn't, and then his gaze flicks to the side out the window. "I want more tacos than I can probably eat. Three? Let's go on a driving adventure."
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