By the time Nicholas comes home late St. Patrick's day evening, Penelope is lounging in the window seat (there is a window seat), an Art Deco desk lamp on a shelf nearby turned on to cast a warm golden glow on the room and a host of candles burning tea lights and votives a host as vast as heaven's all around, on book shelves on the tables near the window sill where there is space for a coaster or two and some knick knacks as long as one is careful with the curtains (the window seat can be closed off with a tapestry) and the pillows (because the window seat is comfortable), lining the walls, on sconces, even floating on the still stone basins of water which are to be found here and there and everywhere.
Penelope's hair is up, fastened in place by an Art Deco comb, and she is in a dark green velvet dressing gown, clasped at the waist with a gold cord; her slippers are velvet, too, and beaded, and she is drinking wine and reading a book and limned in candle-light and she is all these things for no reason other than she felt like it.
The green dressing gown is a favourite, but it was probably chosen because of St. Patrick's Day. If she went out earlier, she has been home long enough to set the place aglow and ablaze and to get quite comfortable in her reading.
Her boots are, it is regrettable to say, in the hallway just in front of the door and her coat is on the stairs, because she didn't put them away.
crow
By the time Nicholas comes home, Penelope has had a chance to settle in with her reading and lounge near the window seat, her profile lent a soft glow by the candlelight, her hair burnished and softened and: she looks Impressionistic, perhaps, there in the window as she reads with wine and book in hand. Nick can see her through the window as he approaches the house.
He stops. It is not cold today, though it will be very soon, and spears of green are shooting up through the newly turned earth in front of their house. Soon they will be flowers, if the cold snap doesn't kill them off.
Nick stops, and he draws in a breath and holds it there in his chest, because he wants some of the mellow air scented with soil and new growth and Ardence to thaw some of what has hardened there, brittle and sharp-edged. The last thing he wants is to breathe any of it onto Pen, or to be distant out of fear that he will; what he wants is balance. What he wants, always, is to avoid old mistakes.
So finally he steps in the front door, and there is a shuffle as he steps on the heels of his shoes to wiggle his feet out of them. Pen can hear the door open and shut, and perhaps the rustle of cloth as he discards his coat (hangs it on top of hers on the stairs, in truth) if her ears are particularly sharp today; she cannot hear Nick as he makes his way to her. This is ordinary extraordinariness, at this point. Maybe she doesn't look up until he's just there, at which point he eases himself into place beside her feet in front of the window.
Mark: he does not look angry, or upset, or much of anything. This is probably how Pen can tell that he is. That, and that instead of greeting her verbally he instead only rests his hand on her shin, runs it up to her knee and traces its shape.
mercury
Pen does only look up when Nicholas is standing just there; a sudden gesture, this rise of gray eyes from the page, and swift too. "Hello, Crow!"
He sits; his expression is nothing. Pen marks it; measures his face, the grace of his hand, the warmth of his palm; the cant of his eyebrows, the bow of his head; measures, and measures, and the filter-through of lake-light radiance gladness yay Nicholas is home goes diffuse and gloaming. She tilts her head back against the window seat's frame, chin canted so her throat's exposed and her gaze is slanted downward. Velvet is a heavy fabric; and soft. Should he have run his hand along her shin atop it, he can feel the slinkstery cold which true velvet hides; should he have run his hand along her shin beneath the robe, well, velvet is also warm and he is better able to feel her knee move when she decides to rest one leg over Nick's lap, bounding him into the window seat nook.
"What's wrong?"
crow
She rests her leg over his lap, binding him there beside her in the window. There is always something grave about him in the half-light, some contrast in him that the flame seems to throw into sharp relief. He had reached beneath the robe, and here as her muscles move he traces them.
"I just got back from talking with Margot," he says. "She called me and wanted to meet me. She was pretty upset."
He has had some time, on the drive home, to process what he would and so it is less fresh than it otherwise might have been. This also means that he has had more time to contain it, and it is not unlike other times when she has seen him angry, though it is a diminished echo of those other times: after Liz, after going overseas, perhaps even after Alexandra.
And because it is an echo, however small, of those times, perhaps this is why he lets out a long sigh and promptly stretches out on the window seat beside her, his head next to her lap, his legs curled up against the wall (no room for them, see.) "What are you reading?"
mercury
"Hild by Nicola Griffith," Pen says. "It is a fantasy book about the saint in my name, so I am curious about it. So far, it is very interesting. The prose is so supple, so liquid, the attention given to language so careful, so fascinating Hild's magick: that of observation. She is a king-maker. It's interesting," she says, again, and of course while Nicholas sighed long, stretched himself out on the window seat beside her (between her and the window, the way these things go), his legs curled up, Pen shifts too, letting the book lie open on her stomach, settling downward on her spine. She is careful of the candle-flame between Nicholas's back and the glass, not very careful of the neighbors who might spy them; having inched lower, leg now settled atop Nick's curled ones, a twist to her spine because she is half-turned toward Nicholas half still with back to the wall.
"Is she all right? What happened?"
crow
Nick listens as she tells him about her book, and shifts to lift himself up on an elbow even as she inches lower onto her spine. He, too, is uncaring of neighbors; they live on the end of the street, they are the nice-but-weird couple in the neighborhood who other people probably gossip about, and sometimes it's fun to give other people something to gossip about. "Tell me how it is when you've finished," he says, of the book. He has made efforts to read more, though he has not made this explicit to her: he has done this because books like this were books he missed as a child, and because it is something to share with Pen.
Pen asks about Margot, and he sighs again, his eyes unfocusing and then when they refocus again it is somewhere above them, on the low hanging arch that makes up the top of the window. "No. Yes?" Beat. "I think she's going to be all right. She's lived through some pretty terrible things, in a way that's stuck with her and - scarred her, I suppose, is the best way to put it. I suspected, but wasn't sure."
He goes quiet again, and there is this twist of his mouth, there is ice water that sluices through his veins and his guts, and this is the sort of thing that has drowned him in the past. "She told me Andrés told her to 'just fix it.' With magic. His nineteen year old apprentice. And she believed that she should be able to do it." He glances up at Pen then, draws in a breath because his hand is wide open, and there's this sharp gesture, and he says, "She came to me asking me how to fix it, that way. Like she thought she's a machine that just needs a tune up. It's..."
Exhale.
mercury
"I know Mages who have done that," Penelope says, after a beat. Her voice is a soft shadow; it invites Nicholas to make more comment. She sets the book aside; it drops to the floor, good thing Ari isn't around to see or hear, landing on its spine with a thump. The next street over, Ari is probably pausing in the middle of a beautifully executed line, a Master calligrapher's finest and most painstaking work, her eyes wide and troubled and a shiver gone down her spine: a book is in danger, a book has been mistreated...
And then Pen twists more, so she is curled a little toward Nicholas, two commas on a window seat.
crow
There is this split second of silence, because Nick has known mages who have done this too, or at least has heard tell. People who have supposedly magicked such things away. And his eyebrows are dark as a crow's wing, or the underside of a cloud, and they are hanging low at this moment. And what he says is, "You can't. Not in a way that's - you can't just cut away a part of you, like it was nothing. And even if you could," this sharp snap, now, "she's an apprentice, and she's young. She needs...the last thing she needs is to think there's something wrong with her, is to be told that. And what if she tried?"
Sharp exhale. "It's just so irresponsible. And then," and his hands are claws and he flings this gesture, almost almost not careful of the candle that is behind him, "he told her this in response to the fact that she froze up when he was being attacked by a Kha'vadi he pissed off doing gods know what. She is his apprentice, and he's just not - "
And just as suddenly as it started, it stops, and the corner of his jaw is tight, and his eyes are only for the sky.
mercury
"Nickolai," Pen says, low in her throat. She must agree with him. Of course she agrees with him. Penelope always tries to face her demons, regardless of how difficult it is, how it makes her cower, waver, how it makes her heart a scared animal fleeing. But Penelope finds it important to be able to face these things; maybe Nick, by now, knows how often she is dismayed by her 'cowardice.'
He has flung a gesture; she finds his hand and twines her fingers with his, before bringing it to her belly and resting it there, then up between her ribs, touched and touching. She releases his hand and grips his shirt instead pressing her knuckles in. "He's just not what?"
crow
This intonation of his name draws his eyes, jolts him out of whatever fugue he might have otherwise settled into, and breathes into the hollow of him that the anger leaves behind. There is another exhale as she takes his hand and rests it on her belly, slides it upward. He tilts his head to the side so that it can rest against her, curls flattened against the forest shadow of her robe. He leaves his hand where it is, thumb against her sternum and fingers following the line of her ribs.
There is another exhale, this one shorter and sharper. "He's not thinking about her or her needs, except as they relate to his own, I don't think," he says finally. "Either of them. And it concerns me. I don't want...they're both mistrustful, and I want them to have what they want, but I worry that I'm doing them a disservice. I like Andrés, but..." Pause. "I don't think he's aware of the power he has over them."
mercury
"I think he is very cavalier. And that they are both very set in their opinions and prejudices," Pen says, and her voice is still a quiet shadow, and she does not sound judging though this is a judgment she has passed; she sounds musing. "But not everybody teaches lessons using kindness, or even care. Not everybody thinks the same thing is kind. I don't know, Crow."
crow
"I know the world is full of powerful people who haven't had the sense to tend their own wounds before they bleed them all over everything else," Nick says, and he does sound judging because he is still angry, because this is far more frank than he is ordinarily. Perhaps later he will regret being so blunt; he will wonder whether he too has been unkind. Whether that unkindness was worth it in the end.
"I don't..." Sigh. "I don't know either, Pen."
mercury
"I don't think he's very good at communicating. Perhaps he didn't mean she had to 'fix it,' like, snap, just turn it off, but was referring to a more gradual build-up of personal character, and finding your center with the aid of the Arts," Pen says, because she tries to be fair, and she is not the angry one right now, and because it might be true. "And maybe he's just unstable as Hell. I do worry about them, those three. He was really attacked by a Kha'avedi?"
crow
Nick sighs, because: Pen is fair, Pen is not the angry one right now, and all of that might be true. He is in the process of deflating, though it will take some time for it to fully dissipate; he is like that. "That's what Margot said. I worry about them too. I guess that's...that's really it. I don't want...I just don't want to miss any warning signs. That's all."
mercury
He doesn't want to miss any warning signs. Pen doesn't respond immediately; maybe something catches in her throat; some sad thing, rising; her gaze is drawn off to the flickering of a flame's edge, over there; how it bleeds gold into the air, diffuse. Nicholas is dark treasure, all fairy tale ebony and crow shadow and stark beauty (she thinks him beautiful) there by the glass, and - well. Pen puts an arm around him, so she can cup his head (bury her fingers in his curls) with her hand.
"Vigilance," she says. And then, "It is wrong, to turn any part of yourself off. It is wrong to remove yourself, I believe, from ... I've always thought it wrong not to ... Not to try to move forward, or to feel with your heart what you are doing or having done."
crow
Pen doesn't answer him immediately; Nick does not seek an answer then, and in that time he only smooths his hand from her ribs and back down to her belly, watching the play of light and shadow over her robe. His eyes fall shut as her fingers weave through his hair, though not for long, because she says Vigilance.
And he must be, mustn't he? What's the point of memory, and memory that spans lifetimes, if not to learn from mistakes?
"I think she's going to try to move forward," he says then. And then, "I wonder if I should try to find the Kha'vedi. Margot didn't say what happened."
mercury
Pen makes a bright sound in the back of her throat; this thoughtful not-quite-hum. She does not, as she often does, massage little circles into Nicholas's scalp; seems content just to feel his curls between her fingers, the shape of him under them, and content (never satisfied) to regard him where he is curled. When she shifts nearer, some of the candles bow their heads; shadows go scudding around the room, and she would have turned off the lamp and given them only candle light if she knew Nicholas was so near coming home, that he would be so angry, so rightfully so.
"If somebody had died, she would have said." Pen smiles; it is almost a joke. The smile does not reach her eyes, only stays hopefully around her mouth. "But probably some spirit knows; they gossip, do they not? Maybe Crow will know."
Pause. "I think you might talk to Andrés, though. Nick-o-lay, Nick-o-lie, she did come to you. Poor Margot," but Pen does not seem surprised to hear that Margot had some kind of trauma, either; her grisly resonance lends itself to certain judgments, especially when contrasted against her demeanor.
crow
"You're probably right," Nick says, of the Kha'vadi. His concern might have been present anyway, but he has also worked with that Tradition in the past; understands them to be poorly misunderstood. And often territorial.
He might have said more, until Pen suggests that he speak with Andrés - and this is likely the best way to get all of his questions answered. "I should probably talk to him," he agrees, and there is another exhale, though less rough at the edges than the others have been, without the same release of a pressure valve. He lifts his head, shifting around so that he can raise himself up far enough to rest his chin on her shoulder. "They're going to get Alexander tomorrow though. It's probably not a good time to go digging." A beat. "Do you think the Order's going to continue to push there, after?"
mercury
"I don't know," Pen says. "If it is not useful in the greater scheme of things, I would say no. I find the lack of vision here, among the other Mages, to be very disheartening." This is not something she would say, Pen, who wears her heart on her sleeve, in her eyes, who is always whole-hearted: "We rescue Alexander; fine. Then what? What does it mean, that he was snatched? What should it mean, for the city? What does it mean that we have somebodies on the inside helping us? I don't think they care; I may be wrong."
crow
If she were to look over at him, she'd find him looking at her, sweeping the curve of her cheekbone and the movement of her lips as she speaks. Maybe he agrees (of course he agrees.) He runs his fingertips over the fabric of her robe, over the curve of her hip and then back up to rest once more over her stomach. "What would your vision be?"
mercury
His chin is on her shoulder, his hand on her stomach. Perhaps just beneath the gold cord, the rope, which belts her robe which is the green of certain shadows, absinthe, lake waters, seas, precious stones. Penelope does look over at Nicholas, Nicholas looking at her, how Nicholas looks at her, where Nicholas looks at her.
"I don't know." Yes she does. This sharp exhale. He'll feel it. As the ribcage expands, the stomach moves; it's the flesh and bone and muscle and sinew equivalent of a storm at sea, how a billow will rise, then roll. "I only... I would see people who can be motivated by something other than terror, and the panic of scrabbling for survival, people who might do good without needing to see a clear victim in front of them. That's all."
crow
Her ribcage expands beneath his palm, swells upward and outward and then deflates again. There's duality in breath, in the way something so simple as the inhale and the exhale becomes the Nothing and the Everything, sacred silence and holy chorus, the yin and yang. That's what the Akashayana say, and some of the Chakravanti, and maybe even some of the Cultists who remember their old ways and from whence their Tradition sprung.
Here at the top, with her lungs full, she is all potential, and it is something that Nick finds beautiful about her, almost as beautiful as he will find its actualization.
He does not say that. He says, almost playfully, "I could get behind that," but see: he could. "How do you think we can motivate them?" For they are a we now, and he is never entirely sure when it happened.
mercury
"I don't know, Nicholas," Pen says, and do note: she does not sound hopeless, saying it, for all it is the honest and clear truth. Pen does not know how to motivate people; she often does motivate people, but she does not know how to, in any calculable way; she can speak, she can write, she can be eloquent and often that is enough.
"How can we motivate one another?" This mischievous look, or perhaps not mischievous: coy, flirting with sly, even though her eyes are still clear and direct and her face is still honest. No, see, now she is letting her eyelashes drift low, as if her eyes would close - it is only languor. "What should we do that is good, without needing to see a clear victim in front of us? What can we do with the power we wield to make something better than it was?"
crow
The look Pen gives him is coy, and the look she gets in response is too provoked into thought by her question to reply in kind, not just yet. It's a difficult subject for Nick to think about, one that he is even perhaps afraid of on some level: he has known so many people, see, who set out only to make the world better. "I don't know, Pen," he says, and this true is the honest and clear truth, without hopelessness in it. "But I...I think something that's important is to look at what we want to see and not what we think is lacking."
He scoots a little closer to her, abolishing any illusions of personal space, and his mouth has turned into her shoulder for a moment before he lifts it and says, "I like helping other people move forward, and understand new things. But I have no idea what that looks like on...well, past what I'm doing now."
mercury
The illusion of personal space: dispelled. That takes a true wizard, or a prophet knight; somebody who can look beyond what is false (which is another way of saying what is temporary). The window seat is not so large; Pen lifts her legs so they are draped over Nicholas's hip, or his thighs, and curls her fingers up his forearm toward his elbow. This quiet hitch in her breathing; she does not imagine it will ever steady; it will always unspool. She is pensive in her languor, so self-contained it might be mistook for imperious, and the back of her head is still leaned against the wall of the window seat.
"When will you begin to teach me the Art of Time?"
crow
This pensive look: Nick has seen it before, and more often, since they arrived here in Denver. And these other times he has not remarked upon it, if only because he was aware that it would have been a sort of hiding: Nick has needed to answer her questions about him, so that he could answer his own. Now, his eyes linger on her face, even after she asks him about the Art of Time.
And here, his hand slides from her stomach and down to her ribs, hooks around and under her as he pulls her the rest of the way to him. "Just name the day. Today. Tomorrow." A beat. "Pen, do you know what we should do with the power we wield? I would...I always get the sense that you do. I want to know."
mercury
Heat. Pen - flushes, slow; either because there is no more space between herself and Nicholas - with Pen fit into him at neatly as a hook into an eye, with Pen no longer an imperious and languorous Glamour against the window seat's back, but instead this ardent-eyed and suddenly focused acolyte of shared space of the mysteries of slipping a hand beneath the hem of a shirt, of a leg held between knees, of neighborhood-scandalizing window seat behavior - or because she is embarrassed. The flush is followed by the cool, pallor gone radiant.
She thinks about her answer to Nicholas because she is thoughtful as a matter of course, and in thought exercise there is truth sometimes. She thinks about her answer to Nicholas because she wants to get at something important, and she is an almost painfully earnest idealist. That hasn't been tarnished (yet [but will it ever tarnish?]). She thinks and her breathing comes a little ragged, until she swoops the tea light between them and the window up pinching the flame out.
"I know what I believe should be done with the sort of power we wield," Pen says, slowly. "I don't really ever have any doubts about that. But Crow, I don't know what we should do, concrete, and here. I don't know how to be an Adept, away from all the structure I have been trained up in. I should hone myself; you should hone yourself. We should be sharp, and readied, but being ready isn't enough. We should temper that with little acts, at least. Acts that -- you're right, what we want to see in the world is important. The most important thing, perhaps."
crow
Pen wicks out the candlelight, plunging the area around the windowseat into shadow. He does not believe she is embarrassed, and so the bloom of heat in her cheeks confuses him though he has the feeling that perhaps maybe they will get to the root of what's been bothering her, something she hasn't been saying.
They have after all been in Denver for over three months now, or at least: that is how long Nicholas has been here with her.
"Ready isn't enough," he agrees. "I want to do more. I just..." And here he trails off, eyes her for a moment and takes in this painful earnestness. "So what is it that you want to see?"
mercury
"A clear path to take," Pen says, with a rueful quirk of her lips. She is honest, but she is also swift of wit. "You want to help people move forward, right? I don't want to -- I mean, I do want people to move forward, but I want to make certain that people have the opportunity and space to move forward, to become something that is ... their best something, and I think people are dragged down from that.
"Perhaps you could use your skills to find such people in danger, before they're in danger; I'll take care of the danger, and then we together can aid those left afterward in finding their most canny choice," Pen says, and she is serious, but at the end of what she is saying, she nestles (fiercely) into (poor[?]) Nicholas, spilling hot wax over the window sill.
crow
"Opportunity and space is important," Nick agrees, because - well, isn't that in some ways a thing that both of them have felt a lack of? And Pen nestles into him, and Nick does not especially seem as though he needs any sort of sympathy here: he is a happy recipient, though fortunately not of the hot wax that puddles behind him.
"I would like that," he says. "I..." A beat. "Well, I probably ought to do more to try to help you with the danger, though." And it is his turn to be rueful, because he has been told this over and over so often. "I want to do even more than that though. I want...I don't know. A more Awake world. A more alive one, where this...where we don't have to struggle to wonder. I've been thinking about that."
mercury
He wants a more Awake world. A more alive one. Pen says, softly, "An age of myth and wonder; a golden age." He's been thinking about that. Pen: she makes this inquiring noise in her throat, pulls away or leans away to watch Nicholas's face. She doesn't make comment on Nicholas doing more to try and help with the danger.
crow
Pen pulls away long enough so she can watch his face, and for a moment until he realizes that she is watching him she'll find him gazing away somewhere over her shoulder, some distant place: perhaps one of the candle flames in the room beyond, or one of the water basins. Nick, he's like this. She knows that.
But when he senses, through some sixth sense or otherwise, that she is watching him he looks back at her too and he says, "Yes. Something like that. I think we're in a...sort of winter, right now. It won't last forever."
mercury
"Mm. I might think that, if I could look ahead, as if Time were no matter," Pen says, with the spark of a smile; her lashes gone low, again, but perhaps he can no longer see her face; she tucks it under his arm having decided to completely reposition herself.
Pen likes to observe Nicholas when he is observing who knows what (perhaps nothing at all; perhaps his own thoughts, or phantasms, or the possibility of either) instead of her, when he is Nicholas unobserved. So when some sense alerts him to her regard and he schools his focus back to her, she is passing wistful.
crow
This spark of a smile, and Nick's eyes have this way of quickening when he is playful, of being at once occluded and bright. Artists will often use shadow for the sole purpose to lend depth to a thing; Nick is like that.
"So when would you like me to teach you?" he asks. She has tucked herself under his arm, and he has reached up behind her and into her hair. His gaze has gone thoughtful, almost pensive. "It will be good to teach you. I don't practice it as often as I should." Then again, in Nick's estimation, it of all Spheres perhaps deserves the most caution. It makes sense that he would think this; he was taught by Jonas.
mercury
"Now," Pen says. Is she joking?
Of course she is not.
crow
Is Pen joking? He knows her better than to think that, for a minute. There is this humored intake of breath and exhale; Nick had on some level already prepared himself for this answer. He knows his wife; it has been said.
"I think the trick of Time is understanding how it works, in and of itself," Nick says, with a slight smile, because he remembers how difficult it was for him to wrap his head around it at the beginning (which is the middle, which is the end.) "How do you understand it to work now?"
mercury
Pen's hand has found its way beneath Nicholas's shirt: this we know. Now she circles the ridge of his rib cage with her thumb, just as water in a holy well will circle one stone for years and years and years 'til it is worn away. Isn't her wine glass nearby? Wasn't that in danger, too? Pen is not prompt to answer.
"Plus Quam Perfectum," she says, at last. "I imagine it to work ontologically under the same principle of Tutt. The time of utterance, or rather how language reacts around the time of utterance. It exists; we are all hung up by it, like the man in the Tarot. Or the Hermit. I know Time belongs to the Wheel of Fortune, so I suppose I imagine I understand it to work in a fashion almost like Ars Fortunae. I just know it orders experience. I don't know how it does so; I'd say the ordering was inherent."
crow
His eyes are half-lidded, and most of his thoughts are on what Pen is saying but occasionally this one pushing in at the edges, of how much he likes it when Pen touches him and maps each line and curve of the frame this life has molded his flesh around. There is an exhale, and a settling, the way this older house that they've chosen settles into the earth and roots itself over time.
"It works as a wheel within in a Wheel," he says. "And can be turned forward, and back. And like any other circle, it's one whole: the past and the present and the future are not separate, and they all exist concurrently. That's an easy thing to say and a more difficult thing to grasp. When we perceive time, or manipulate it, we aren't moving forward or back so much as finding a different place in the cycle."
mercury
Pen had untucked her face from his arm around the time she answered his question about how she 'understands' Time to work right now. Which is, essentially, it works, and by working we communicate (and by working, maybe one day we rot).
"How do you think that way? When you want to find a different place in the cycle? What helps you grasp it, truly?"
crow
"It depends on what I'm trying to do with it," Nick says, and glances down at Pen as she untucks her face from his arm. "I find it helpful to do things that ground me less in my body. I fast, or I meditate, or if I'm looking into the past I look for things that call to it and focus on that. The future is harder for that reason. It gets murky."
A beat. "Jonas uses the Tarot to read and structure what he saw, when he was looking ahead or past. I can do that, but it wasn't especially helpful to me. It may be to you, though."
mercury
"I can do things that ground me less in my body," Pen says, after a hesitation, and her thumb leaves his ribcage so she can measure the jut of his hipbone instead, then the cohesion of a belt loop. They're already close, right, as bee and rose, as gull and air, and one - only one - lock of hair has come unpinned from her tidy upsweep, and it cuts across her strong jaw and the pulse at her throat and it is like a line of blood.
What to address or ask first? Tarot. "I have used Tarot before, to read fortune in the moment. What... why do you think Tarot would be helpful to me? And why wasn't it, to you?"
crow
"The key for me is to find ways to bring myself out of the present, or to understand how it relates to - how it is - the past and the future. How each time something occurs it has occurred in something like that way thousands of times before, and will again. There are small cycles and large ones. The sun rises and sets and we breathe in and out and each small thing is contained within something greater."
There is this pause, because Pen's presence is certainly not doing anything to ground Nick less, though just now it's all to the good. He wants to be right where he is. He considers the shape and texture of the velvet as it dips and folds together between her shoulderblades.
"I thought the Tarot might be easier for you because of the narrative, and the concepts. I've just never used that kind of thing to Work. Not that I couldn't, but it's less intuitive for me." A beat. "What things can you do to ground you less?"
mercury
"You, O Bright and Hallowed Fire," Pen says. "I will be a Moth," and she nibbles, neatly and suggestively and rather delicately on Nick's collar: a feint. A true answer, maybe, but also a feint.
"...But you are right," she says. "I do find Tarot attractive, because of the symbols, because of all that connotation and metaphor. Perhaps the narrative, too. I don't know that I need narrative; only a moment of origin - does that make sense? A center? I keep wanting to come back to the moment of speaking."
Pause; her voice gone quiet, a stillness in it. "I could hold vigil."
crow
This is a feint; unfortunately, it's the kind of feint that usually works on him even when he knows it's a feint. He stirs momentarily at what she says; Nick has gotten more and more used to accepting the poetic terms she uses for him, even when traces of embarrassment still linger. His breath catches: and it's her true answer, and he would've been content to let her feint away. There's always more time (hope) to revisit a topic.
When she shifts back to Tarot, he lifts his head so that he can rest it in his palm, leaning on elbow. "It makes sense," he says. "Having a center in mind, or a specific point in time, helps. Especially at first."
Pen is still waters after that, gleaming and with untold depths that he can only guess at. "Vigil for whom?"
mercury
"Not that kind of vigil, necessarily. But a vigil for myself. for tomorrow; for myself yesterday and myself tomorrow. For whatever comes during the vigil, even if it is only the thinning flame of wakefulness. A vigil for the hope in your heart. Have you ever held that kind of vigil before?"
The comb holding her hair has become somewhat dislodged; the upsweep holds, but begins to lose its shape; become suggestive of Maenad wildness, of sorceries. When Nicholas lifts his head and sets it on his palm, Pen regards his palm his fingers his hand with a look of faint betrayal. Her finger had hooked hard on his belt loop; now it considers the articulation of his spine.
crow
Here: faint betrayal from Pen, and so he smiles and lets his head drop back down onto his arm again, leaving his eyes even with hers. His hair tumbles out and across his arm in waves (and how appropriate, that Nick-before-Nick was Anointed By Dark Water. Did she see him, in the future, and know that she would never Ascend? Can even Masters see so far?)
"No," he says quietly. "I haven't. I...I think maybe I would like to, though. With you." He reaches for the stray lock of her hair that has worked free of the comb, reaching up to tuck it behind her ear. "Tell me more about what you have in mind."
mercury
Pen's gaze follows the movement of his hand and arm when he lets it go long again, dropping his head back down; the faint hint of betrayal does not quite dissipate, the fragrance left behind when one candle is blown out in a vast church hall, whatever subtle witchery is done between wick and air and fire and nothing. Then Pen's gaze finds Nick's again and stays, and her mouth bows (this is faint, too), touch of the luminous to her. She hooks her knee over Nick's hip, and (hypocrite [?]) props herself up on her elbow. Traces the line of his arm-through-his-shirt with the backs of her fingers.
"In the past, when I have held vigil, it has been before or after something of great moment to my life. I held one when -- do you remember those three days in April, before we married one to the other, when I went off for a weekend? I was holding vigil. I held vigil before I went Seeking for the first time, too, and then again afterward. I ... well, I have found it helpful to be in a room with open windows." Pen casts her gaze toward the ceiling, thoughtfully.
"And candles lit, of course; and some water, but not much; and some food, but again, not very much, and only if it is a long vigil. Something simple like rice. Chalk to draw with. An object to contemplate, or hold."
"I don't know how it will help with me learning Time, but it does take me away from my body. Or it has in the past."
crow
The chantry that Miles Lockbourne established was there to act as something of a surrogate: many of the people there, for one reason or another, had come to it because they were estranged from family, or from people who might have meant something to them prior to Awakening. Nick did not have only one acarya; he learned some things from Miles and some from Patricia and some from Jonas and some from Delilah, after his initiation.
Pen's vigils, they remind him of Miles and what he learned from Miles, and it tugs at a corner of his mouth, this pleased and thoughtful thing. He has tilted himself just slightly so that he can look up at her, as she's lifted herself above him now.
"It may be helpful to you in learning to look into the past, too," he says. "If you wanted to do that. You're marking the end of a cycle, it sounds like. An end and a new beginning."
mercury
Her throat works; a swallow, bare. She is thirsty suddenly, leaves the line of his spine alone, leaves the warmth of his skin alone too, She reaches over him for the wine glass, which has been holding vigil by the window, beside its own ghostly reflection. First the flame went out, and then the wine glass was alone. Pen holds it between them, and there is careless grace here. She could break it if she is not careful; the glass holds her breath; does the wine warm to it? "I don't want to look into the past," she says.
crow
Pen reaches over him for the wine glass, and this is almost abrupt, the way in which the warmth of her fingers leaves him. She is holding the glass between them then as she swallows from it, and Nicholas watches her, watches how the glass mists as she breathes into it. There is a part of him that has always known this about her, because it's all there between the lines and in the things she doesn't say, the people she doesn't see so much.
Look into the heart of someone who is so focused on the future, who sees it as some bright thing beckoning and calling, and almost invariably the past is something of a shadow. This is a truth.
"You don't have to," he says, and smooths his hand over the swell of her ribcage. The velvet is sleek, he can't feel the ridges beneath, but he still traces with his fingers the place where a few of her ribs ought to be. There is a beat, a silent debate that he settles with, "Are you afraid that it would only make you want to change it?"
mercury
You don't have to.
(Pen sips from the [chalice] cup, holding Nicholas's gaze.)
Are you afraid
(She still holds his gaze, but offers him the cup)
that it would only make
(And this room smells of a candle just gone out; two of the tea lights in the hall have burned their wicks down to the quick are nothing now but a fragrance, a lilt of memory, that swallow-it-down smell;
her ribs expand. Her lips are parted, and wine-wet.)
you want to change it?
(She licks them.)
"No." Her gaze goes to the side, his shoulder or arm again, some point where reverie can spin out. "I just believe if I knew how to look into the past, I'd look at things it's better for me not to see like that. Like my gaze can roam anywhere and anywhen. I'd want to see how Lysander was when he fought Carolingas, back when he was only twenty. I'd want to see Jonas when he was just new. I'd want to, I mean those at least: they aren't mine, so maybe I wouldn't look. But ... Liz, I'd look for her. And my Dad, I'd try to follow him to see. And..."
"I just ... I know there would be no point, it would be indulgent, and it would hurt. But I think I would do it."
She's afraid she would do it.
crow
Pen is offering him the wine glass; for the moment he does not take it, because his gaze has gone diffuse and he is looking inward, perhaps. "I think of all the magick we can learn, Time is the most dangerous," he says. "At least for us, as individuals. I think you're wise to be afraid."
Why he has been spared this temptation he does not know; perhaps at its core is mere Traditional difference, their teachings and beliefs. He takes the wine glass from her, and he swallows. "I don't look into the future, that way. At least, not for myself or for anyone I know. Not the long term. I don't think I ever will."
mercury
"I would look into the future." Pen loosens the gold braid rope around her waist and takes the wine glass back from Nicholas, if he is done drinking. She swallows again, and says, "You could change that if you didn't like it, or it could warn you, or let you know how much time you have to complete a task."
Maybe here's where Penelope's understanding of Time is nascent: is not Nicholas's own. She does not have the same kind of sense of inevitability; she has a sense of inevitability, but it is not one that brooks inability by man to change what is to come if he wishes to.
"Why don't you look into the future? Because you don't want to be like -- others?"
crow
To what she says, her suggestion as to how it could be useful: he nods, because he could see the potential usefulness here. Likely just as Pen could understand how under some circumstances it could be helpful to see into the past. Still, is the Hope at the bottom of the box, curled into a corner like a sole bright golden thread, worth the fears and furies and horrors that stream out ahead of it?
Perhaps.
"I worry that I would be," he says. The taste of the wine is heavy in his mouth, left a dry sensation on the back of his tongue. "Everything eventually has to end. I think it would be...terrible to see the end, and still know that no matter what you change you're only exchanging one end for another." A beat. "Jonas told me once that he sifted through multiple threads once, drew a few times, and in all of them his fate was ultimately the same. I think he stopped after that."
mars
[BUT WAIT.]
mercury
Pen stays silent for a long time to stay silent in the middle of a conversation. While she is silent, her hand strays to Nicholas's waist, just by her knee on his hip which flexes to draw him nearer her at the midpoint of her silence. The loosened robe sweeps down over one shoulder, at the neck. A green shadow, an arcing curve. And she does not fix her gaze on some other point, just (lips parted, the moment before a Word is born) looks into Nicholas's eyes but is seeing something -- it wouldn't be fair to say 'else.' Absorbed by thought as she is, she is still looking consciously at Nicholas.
"I don't know what to say about Jonas. I want to say ... that the worst curse I ever heard of anybody being under was to be so skilled, so - so full of potential, so sighted when it comes to others but stricken with an inability to see in his own way anything but tarnish. But you know I don't believe his fate has to be," a pause; sometimes silence is more eloquent.
"And I..."
Intimate, see, as mist on a water, that's her voice right now. "I guess I just don't worry about that. Maybe I should? If you exchange one end for another, you know at least you have done it. You have done it. And all ends are the same, aren't they? We die."
"I don't mind swapping deaths around, as long as I try to do well beforehand. I don't think I will mind knowing what might happen. Ultimately. Because I already do? Only the details will be a surprise. But perhaps I would not look so far. I don't know how useful it would be."
"I don't know why I can't think about the past like that."
crow
Pen, she stays silent. It is something that Nick never minds; he is comfortable with it, happy to be drawn in closer until he could not possibly be any closer than he is right now. He wraps his arm around her waist, his fingertips tracing the curve of her spine. What is difficult for him is to not look away, to hold her eyes (or more accurately, to allow them to hold him there, whatever she is seeing in them.)
Anything but tarnish.
And then look away he does, this quick sweep down and to the right, his lashes half-lowering, dark and feather-soft, over the sharp edges of his cheekbones. Because: he does not fear death. Nicholas does not need to say this. It's the details. But she knows that.
His eyes return to hers again as she stops talking, and his own are clear amber, enlivened as they are by the half light. "I think the only thing I can truly say I regret is that I didn't see Liz more clearly. She was suffering and I made all the wrong conclusions. And I always think that maybe if I...well, that maybe she wouldn't have Fallen."
He draws in a breath, holds it there in his chest. "I think, if I did look back into that one thing, if I ever saw all the little signs that I missed or..." Beat. Because sometimes silence is more eloquent. "I think guilt and regret are like that."
mercury
Pen's gaze drops, uncertain, to Nicholas's chest and stays there.
When? Pen (daring?) does keep her gaze on his until after he finishes speaking.
He'd looked away; when he'd looked back he'd seen her still, just looking at him in that way she has. He doesn't know how she looks at him when he isn't looking at her; he has maybe felt it, sometimes, the certainty that her gaze is on him, turned to find it but when their eyes meet hers react to the meeting, to the share of the gaze; when he is looking away, it's another kind of look.
crow
Her gaze has come to rest somewhere around his chest, to the loosened top button of the light blue striped shirt he wore to work today. His gaze when she does is this tender thing, wonder just overshadowed by affection and desire and just now touched with uncertainty. Whatever opaque layering might be laid over it under most circumstances fallen away because that is Nick when no one is looking at him. Of course: she is looking away and she does not see him.
He doesn't say anything, not for a few moments: gives her space to see if she simply needs to gather her thoughts.
Her eyes are still there, and his hand slides up her back and over her shoulder, over the dip in her neck where her robe has fallen away, and he traces his thumb over her cheekbone. "Is it something else?"
mercury
So her gaze flicks up to meet his again, and stay. Pen is a Romantic at heart. Always has been, ever since she was digging holes to Hades to bury her hand-bound books of poetry in. Her eyes are almost dark, reflect Nicholas and the night beyond the window; there is candle light in her hair.
"I just miss people sometimes." Pause.
Sudden movement; she catches his hand; turns her mouth to his palm and lines her fingers up with his so they are cupped they are cradled.
"I wish I had been better for you. I wish to be better."
She smiles; turns the edge of the smile once more into his hand, which she still has hold of, so. "Teach me more about Time. Shall we hold a vigil soon?"
"Shall you help me be unrestrained and loosed from my body?"
Sug-gest-ive.
crow
She misses people sometimes, she says, and the smile that appears there is more in his eyebrows and eyes, soft at the edges: wistful.
Pen has not allowed him to trap himself there, and as she smiles he cannot help leaning in and kissing her cheek, just at the corner of her mouth, just where the skin begins to lift. "Soon," he agrees.
Her next question chases away whatever wistfulness might have remained in his smile, and the second kiss is deeper, is ardent. His glance over his shoulder to the window, and then around to the curtains that hang there at the edges, is an afterthought. He reaches over to yank them into place, and they fall in quiet folds over the chilled panes of glass and against his back: a momentary distraction, but one it's probably better that he took the time for.
They've scandalized their poor neighbors enough for one night.
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