Nicholas Hyde gets a text somewhere around 7:59 pm from Pen.
T: Nick, where are you?
--
Pen has been extremely scarce today. When he came home, she popped out to say hello, but disappeared again almost immediately. When Pen is focused on something, she blocks all else out, no matter how compelling the all else is.
Pen has just today made certain the lock on her study door works and has locked it and herself in behind it. There are three keys to the lock, one on a necklace she will not often wear, another with Nicholas for just in case, and the third buried back in the fallow ground that will one day be a garden or even back beyond that. There was a fourth key, but it was melted in the forge in the cellar and it gave up on being a key; it will only remember being a key in flashes, suggestive.
Her fingers are chalky; a piece of heavy metallic chalk (there is silver in it, and there was river-water) between them.
There is a curved line on her floorboards, and then another, and another; zoom out, and the curved lines compass a circle, which compasses an Enochian sigil, which compasses some invocation in Ancient Greek.
crow
It's funny how easily things become routine. Even four years ago if someone had told Nick that right now he would be married, and sharing a house with his wife in Denver, and spending time turning over gardens with his Hermetic cabalmate and giving his evenings over to studying, he would probably have leveled a look at that person, and stared until they caved and told him the truth. Now: he is in the process of becoming well accustomed to how Pen disappears when she's become focused on something.
He'd given her an affectionate smile when she'd come out to say hello and had otherwise assumed she'd be in her study all night. And then he'd gone to call his mother and now he's settled into his own study upstairs.
He is at this very moment huddled in his huge red leather desk chair, cracked and beaten and worn smooth in places, and he is contemplating this little circle Ari has given him. See? It's in his palm. And he is thinking, too, about his conversation with Sera.
Pen's text makes his phone chirp, and he picks it up and - well, she ought to know, but.
T: In my study. Do you need me to bring you something?
mercury
[Hmmm... Intelligence + Esoterica (Enochian), did I use it correctly?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 7) ( success x 1 ) [Doubling Tens]
mercury
T: No!
And then, silence. Meanwhile:
[Correspondence 3 Fancy Name For Teleporting Insert Here Later. Vulgar without witness. Diff 7! But then! -1 from Enochian, -1 from personalized instrument, -1 taking time. Workworkwork!]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 5, 5) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
crow
[??????????]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
mercury
He is in his study, in his big cracked leather red chair. Nicholas has a circle in his hand and he can feel the circle in his hand. He can feel the moment the air is transformed into a gate too. The air is the air stays the air oxygen to be breathed to be transformed and taken into blood the air which is translucent which light passes through which lays against the skin and you never think of the air. The air is the air it is simply that which it is natural to move through. Not like this, though: the air, splitting; opening, a door - and Pen walking (striding) through the improbable split, this moment where Resplendence kicks off her like light on water (Ardent [Burning] as any look given from one lover to another, from one inventor to their genius, from one zealot to its priest), where Daring is a taste, something to be swallowed, the sudden up-swing surge of that split-second decision to take the plunge to stand up and speak to not back down to not waver to try for a risk to take it to be courageous.
Of course it might look like Pen is practically shaped out of air, stepping from some far-flung (the room next door) place as she is. Behind her, a suggestion of location, but it is just a stained glass location: hint of colors, blurring, of recognizable shapes already boiling away because the gate is rough and it closes behind her as soon as she is through snaps shut almost catches one of her curling hairs because her hair is curling is certainly ardent embers burning tonight vibrant with shadow and exhales once she is through.
She is misleadingly poised -- it gives her the impression of assurance (so does Will-working like that; she did that! Nobody else, and nothing; it happened because she chose for it to happen, because she bent the world), even of coolness: cool skin, cool clothes, cool gray eyes.
Pen almost turns to look behind her; doesn't quite. Finds Nicholas - damn, is she facing the right way? Yes! Yes, good, yes she is, her guess was accurate - and smiles, faintly.
"Nicholas!" Her voice wasn't left behind; that's good. "I have decided I have gone too long without seeing your face."
Be cool, Pen.
Be cool.
crow
Had Nicholas been standing in church and some creature of flame became manifest out of the stained glass, striding with purpose to light on the stone: Nick would not have been more surprised then than he is now. There are times when Pen, her power and poise and daring, has left him speechless (this is different, you see, than the times when he chooses to say nothing.) Pen cuts the air and divides space and stands before him, and her Will is resplendent.
Nick, who is seated with his knees drawn up against his chest, cannot hide his awe. He doesn't want to, you see.
The circle slides from his hand to the desk and it does not rattle; there is only this heavy click as it settles on the wood. And he rises up to stand and face her, and her words are cool, as though this were nothing, as though she hadn't literally bent the laws of spacetime just to appear before him, just like this.
Nick finally finds his voice. "That was beautiful," he says, with the simultaneous sense that his words are not enough, "and so are you."
A cutting sort of swashbuckler's grace: that's Pen.
mercury
There is a phrase, so often-used it is almost mundane - glowing with pleasure. Pen is not glowing with pleasure; she is incandescent.
"Your face is all I ever hoped for," Pen says, teasing (there's a lure in it; bait) but double-layered. The moment of cool façade is gone; the façade is cracked; she grins, quick and bright with this exhilaration moving like blood under her skin. She bounces on the balls of her feet and circles her arms around Nicholas's shoulders and says, "Nicholas Nicholas!"
Because she is too pleased even for eloquence so she just says his name a few times.
"That was only the first time! I will never need use stairs again! Or climb very steep paths, or find myself stymied by a cliff face, or be woeful when presented with a prison! Were you surprised?"
He was, but she wants him to say it. The truth is: Pen was scarce because she didn't want him to somehow guess (he would guess [she believes he would]) that she had something to show him, that she was going to try something grand: there's a tremor in her voice; it works its way under her skin and she shivers once.
crow
If Pen is brilliant, her joy and exuberance exuding from her like waves of light, Nicholas is the moon (it reflects the sun). Pen throws her arms around his shoulders and he catches her around the waist and he laughs at how lost she is for words at first, and at her words that come next.
"If an angel had parted the heavens to stand in front of me and serve me with some god-given quest, I wouldn't have been more surprised than I was just now," he says, and despite the gentle humor with which he says this he is honest. "You can also just leave parties now when they get tiresome, or drop in on Ari without warning once she's moved in."
The possibilities are as infinite as they are.
This is an Art that Nick too has been learning and has just begun to grasp the edge of, though he does not say this yet. "Is that what you've been busy studying?"
mercury
Pen cups her hand in his hair and presses her mouth against his shoulder and smiles (private [personal]) just to herself when he says how surprised he was. Inhales slowly, then lets Nicholas go. Only to, as he adds to the list of Things One Can Do By Tearing A Gate Open, take up Nicholas's hands and: yes, dance. This emotive lift of her eyebrows as she holds his hands in the proper position and then: slinky coy push and pull begin quiet she is just so pleased with herself and this is going to end with a whirl or a twirl but not yet this is the rev up.
"I can leave parties now when they get tiresome; but it is often cowardice to do so. Ari…" Pen cants her head to the side, gaze gone sidelong and turned slightly upward (contemplative mischief; on Pen it does not look mischievous at all, but rather has the guise of dreaming consideration - how hushed it is; what mystery lies beneath the witchery of water, see?).
In the moment's quiet, Nicholas has time to ask his question and Pen (this is the twirl Nick! Come on!!! Twirl! She stands back, lifting one or both arms high) brings her focus back on Nicholas and a present in which she has not just surprised Arianna with a Sudden and Dramatic Appearance.
Is this what she has been busy studying.
"Partly; today's new trick is a something of a surprise epiphany. I wasn't looking to raise my understanding of this Art just - well no that is a lie. Of course I have been studying it; mostly on my own," and her voice gone tarnished. Not melancholy; she is still far too pleased and happy and exhilarated (passionate), but she is also in control of herself. "Two days ago I found an essay down at the chantry which just - plink!" Pen taps Nicholas's temple with two fingers. "And now I feel, just a little bit, like I have been all too slow and I can't imagine what was taking me so long last week to figure it out, but I've only done it once and I felt this way about shade in oil painting and then I messed it up so poorly on my second try that even a Renaissance priest wouldn't have recognized the Hellscape I accidentally painted."
crow
This is the twirl, Nick!
So he twirls her, with a graceful flick of his wrist and out and then curls her back in. This is easy to do, when someone else is leading; all it takes is a good sense of where someone else is going to move next, some anticipation of movement and repose. Maybe for this span of seconds he isn't sure whether he'd rather kiss her or hear her talk, and he is torn, as though with sufficient skill in Time or Space or whatever else, he'd do both.
He shares her mischief, and on Nicholas it actually does look quite mischievous, because his mystery is a cloak he dons and flashes about at opportune times. If they're playing a trick on Ari: count him in.
Pen taps his temple with two fingers and he smiles, then. "I'm glad that you were successful this time and that you didn't end up stuck somewhere in the wall of my study. It would've been pretty awkward to explain to the landlord if I'd had to knock it down to get you out." Magic: it's fraught with peril. "I just started to understand how to use that Sight. I think talking with Ari this weekend helped. Not," another quick smile here, "that it's anything like learning to stride through walls."
mercury
Now Penelope wishes to twirl Nicholas, and will laugh at him and shake her head if he tries to curl her out and then back in again, gesture with the other hand scribing a little spiral with her finger turn turn.
Pen: an airy hand-wave, and the trials and travails of Nicholas explaining to the landlord had anything gone wrong; and then -
oh, the swaying ebbs and she goes quite still. Keeps Nicholas's hands (has taken them both up again, after that airy hand-wave), and her expression is one of froze surprise, mouth parted on a word, clear eyes wide and intent and noticing. Impulsive pull of his hands to her heart and clasped together, like she just had to clasp her own hands there: "Nicholas!" she says, over his 'like learning.' If he keeps speaking 'to stride through walls' will drown beneath - "Oh, beautiful Crow! This is so thrilling. How? What? Where? How have you used it? When did it work for you? Close your eyes and use it right now! Oh, oh, we can play games of moving through space without sight now; it is such an interesting feeling."
Pen releases his hands to flatten her right hand direct against her breastbone.
crow
[Corr 1 effect. Coincidental. -1 for focus. -1 taking time. WP 'cause I want to impress Pen!]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (2, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
crow
Pen wants to twirl Nick, and Nick picks up on this desire and plays along with it well enough, though with the hesitation and unfamiliarity of movement that suggests that he has not done a lot of twirling, at least within this life. They are, at least, almost of a height, which makes the gesture somewhat more fluid than it otherwise might have been.
Pen goes quite still then, and is still holding his hands, and in the face of her surprise he cannot quite hide how pleased he is. See the little smile that has transformed both his mouth and the sharp dark lines of his eyebrows. "I've been studying," he says, "so I can learn to summon. Ari spoke with me a little over the weekend about the gift she gave me, and the use of circles, and I had at one point asked her how they move outward, and it...well, it was helpful. I had this sense that they were also doorways, and...I don't know. That it would make sense then for all kinds of unseen pathways to be there that we couldn't see, like I found that one time. I used it when I went out walking yesterday, just to see if I could sense where I was going and to see what I couldn't see."
Pen had suggested that he close his eyes and use it, and Nick nods; she has already released his hands and it is only a few short steps back into the doorway to his study, where he does indeed close his eyes.
And perhaps she can feel the breathe in, breathe out, the hallowed hush of his resonance then: this slow expansion of his consciousness as it moves to encompass more than himself. "Move, and I can still see you," he says with his eyes closed.
mercury
[! Awareness.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )
mercury
He takes a step back and another one. Pen's attention sharpens on Nicholas, the brightness of it metallic (lake-light drenched, a rising hope). He is standing on a threshold and when he closes his eyes Pen brings her hands together again and presses her fingertips to her lips and perhaps it is because of the tidal wash of his Work which is reverence which is hallowed which is a Church hall the air in it and the hope which is a glade with water, falling, falling, and the stars so clear and bright. Pen stays quite still for a moment, quite poised, and her hands find her hips, so she is facing down Nicholas's heightened senses.
"Shall I challenge you?"
Only after she has spoken does Pen begin to move. To the side, care-ful-ly, cros-sing one leg over the other t-i-p-t-o-e easing ebbing to the side.
There is a thread running through her voice, and it is a promise of fun and games; she is asking herself as much as she is asking Nicholas.
Shall they play a game with magick?
crow
His eyes are still closed, and perhaps it is this, the fact that his focus is inward and spiraling outside himself, the fact that he doesn't have a million small distractions, that makes his smile all the brighter. "Challenge me," he says, and this is more playful than it is combatant.
Nicholas prefers open spaces to clutter and his study reflects this: the desk against the corner, this massive thing of solid pitted old wood, and the red leather office chair, and the rug covered with spirals of black and grey on the floor (does it cover something? perhaps it covers something.) His boxes have been unpacked, and now there is a series of bookshelves lining his walls, again this sort of heavy solid old wood that he seems to favor, polished to a warm glow. (Nonmagickal books, all, but still significant, or so he would argue.)
The center of his study, other than the rug itself, is unencumbered by clutter; Pen could move easily between his desk and his bookshelves or to the armchair that sits in the opposite corner nearest the window. The study is almost an implied circle in and of itself, with the way everything in here is arranged, a sort of natural flow to the place.
Photos are on the walls. In one corner a yew staff leans against one of the bookshelves. In the other corner, opposite the door, a stone basin of water, the plane of which is so smooth and still it might as well be a looking glass, a lake in miniature.
As she begins to move, she can see Nick's head turn just a little in her direction. "Be careful that I can't hear you. I don't want to cheat."
mercury
[Already ahead of you! Forces 2: LET THERE BE NO SOUND. Eh, I think coincidental? Diff 5. -1 personal instrument. -1 practiced. Willpower because want to give Nick a good challenge! So much silence there will be!]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (6, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) [WP]
mercury
[Urk, no, not personal instrument, using an instrument when she doesn't have to. *nod* Not that it matters for that roll, but meh!]
mercury
[Okay, and one more thing! Let's see if Enochian will shave off some of the difficulty.]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 5 ) [Doubling Tens]
mercury
[Let's try to suspend some books in the air, too. Forces/Matter 3, but vulgar w/ out witnesses as Hell. Diff 7. -3, thanks Enochian! +WP.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 7, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
mercury
Pen is a wizard of House Flambeau. He will not hear her. She twists a ring around one finger, then sketches a gesture in the air, doing (it is perhaps the splash of his resonance, makes her choose this ritual, this minor rite) reverence to the thief and the sneak himself, the gesture practiced and no longer needed and yet and yet she likes the flamboyant grace of it the artfulness of it.
He will not hear her. He does not hear her. Not a sound. Not her breathing, not when she says a line of poetry as a test. Not the creak of her weight on the study's floorboards or the hush of her steps against carpet. Not the rattle roll of his desk chair when she moves it so that it is in the center of his round, round rug, or any wooden clump thunks when she goes to his bookshelves and takes one big stack of books from the shelf to stack on the ground a dolmen a standing stone of paper and ink and words right in his way and then another not quite as tall and then another tallest of all (challenge, challenge, though he knows this obstacle course as she makes it - doesn't he?), and then it is the yew staff which she takes up, strokes in a way that greets the grain of the wood hello and savors the silkfeel of it and then she rests the staff so it is balanced on one end of one of the book stacks and then also resting on the chair, a thou shallt not pass guardian gate, and then! And then! Pen in absolute silence without so much as the slightest speck of sound goes back to his desk. Moves any clutter that might be there aside, carefully, and climbs onto it, standing (there is something about standing, high, on a platform, a stage, a dais, a cliff-top, something that begs the next moment to be a soaring moment falling moment Icarus moment wax in one's wings), edging all the way to the corner, and then - wait.
Pen says something in the language of angels Nicholas doesn't hear.
She says it very well, and another row of books from Nick's bookshelves finds itself positioned as part of an obstacle course, but this row of drifts in through the air and is suspended dragonfly in amber star in the heavens right where somebody would least expect to have a staggered row of books (what is this, a surrealist's painting?) smack them in the face.
Then, well-satisfied, Pen leans back against the wall and folds her arms over her chest, waiting and watchful to see what Nicholas does.
She is very happy.
crow
[I know they're there. Can I actually get around them, is the question.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 5) ( fail )
crow
[Gah. Trying again! Higher diff!]
Dice: 3 d10 TN7 (1, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
crow
He is patient as Pen arranges his study just so, as she utters her experimental lines of poetry and shifts her weight across the floorboards, and he cannot here her: no thunk-thump or rattling of his desk chair or anything. Not even any vibrations across the ground as she moves objects around, scatters his books and his shelves, and this besides that ardent heat of her resonance is what tells him she has dampened everything with a Forces effect.
He is still smiling to himself. Somehow even without his eyes wandering he manages to seem a little far out there; though this is likely because he is busy gauging just where she has placed everything, trying to think his way through and around and to anticipate exactly what she is going to do next.
He, too, is very happy. His Traditionmates do not play like this, and perhaps there is a sort of soaring hope in him too, just now. It is Nicholas: so it is hard to tell.
Ah, so here are these books stacked just so across his rug, and across the circle he has begun to lay out beneath (soon enough it will be a summoning circle, once he figures it out, but it's not yet.) And his staff laid across those, and these books suspended, with faint traces of the scent of paper and ink the only hint that they are there.
So he goes to move through the obstacle course, and Nick, he has little physical prowess to speak of - a fact with which Pen is probably woefully familiar. He had plenty of Traditionmates back on the east coast that would have happily engaged him in combat training, but he never did this, whatever his reasons, and riding bikes and hiking don't require the kind of coordination he needs right at this moment. So: one foot knocks over the first stack of books, and his laugh is amused and only slightly sheepish.
Then he tries again, and this time, though she won't be able to write poetry to the grace of his movements, he winds over and around and under the books, one of his curls only just brushing the bottommost of a book, and over again and then under under the staff, and then he finally reaches the window. Bumps into it. Laughs again and then turns to Pen, this time with his eyes open. "...I think I need more obstacle course practice to be good at this."
mercury
[Oh! That gives me an awesome and stupid idea! Dex + Athletics! Diff let's say 8. But uh, we will also WP this, because one doesn't want to break one's neck when one is showing off.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (2, 2, 3, 4, 4) ( success x 1 ) [WP]
mercury
"I am impressed," Pen says, quite rakish on Nicholas's desk, with that half-smile and that cocky lilt to her head. He does give her an idea. Can practically see the moment it touches her, causes her to straighten her spine and look not at Nicholas but at the obstacle course itself. The floating books, suspended in air, rather than the books stacked like a cairn. Pen rubs her hands together, and then - springs! Attack! Which is to say, she wants to jump and catch the highest floating book with her hand and see if she can hang-glide with it for a few feet (into Nicholas's wall, whatever). Unfortunately, though she just barely catches it, the glide is all too short. Her feet hit the ground hard, and she laughs: "Not high enough; drat it and darn it and give it away."
And then, again, "I am impressed, Nick. Soon you'll be able to pluck a bullet from the chamber of a gun pointed at you from across a room! Or you'll be able to leave your wallet at home, but never actually leave it at home! Put notes in secret places, places you could never have reached or unlocked!"
"Do you feel different, knowing how to see like that? What was it like?"
crow
Pen springs for the highest floating book (this happens to be, let us say, a compendium of The Chronicles of Narnia, one of the many childhood books he is now getting around to reading after developing a greater appreciation for books later in life) and catches the edge, coming and landing hard on his floor. Do her feet still make no sound?
Surprise had sketched his eyebrows into two sharp arches as she sprang, and as she lands he only laughs. "I would have broken my neck if I'd tried that."
Pen is impressed, she says, and see how there's this warm glow in him, how simply pleased he is made by the praise. "What I would like to do, besides never forget my keys again," he says, "is figure out how to use True Names to begin summoning."
He toes the rug, his bare toes digging for a moment into the plush thickness of it, wiggling into the fabric. "I feel as though I have a better sense of...being a part of everything else," and he is musing here. A beat. "I would also like to learn to see everything."
mercury
"What will you learn to see next?"
There is sound now. Was, since she spoke to him, a finger crooked behind her elbow, a spell discarded and released. When she hits the ground, she hits the ground audibly, there is an audible click of her teeth as her jaw sets, and when she steps now there is the usual cadence of Penelope's assured tread. The books still float and fly, though the one she sprang upon is flying more lowly in the air.
"And do you think you'll forget the trees for the forest once you know how?"
Pen gathers the flying books up, pushing them together back toward the shelf they were originally on. She does this with her hands, herding them; once they are near the shelf, she pushes them under. They persist in wanting to fly, lifting up off the shelf and bumping against the shelf above them. Once she has all of the books corralled, she makes another gesture - sharp, cutting, and says a word. They drop. There's sound to that, too. Only an inch they drop, no more.
crow
"The wind, maybe," Nick says, again this musing. Pen is herding all of his books back onto the shelf, for which he is grateful, and now he moves to retrieve his staff first, to pick it up where it was balanced on chair and book stack. He twists it around in his hands for a moment, this loving gesture given to a prized object, and he sets it upright in the far corner against his desk and the wall.
He would like to touch Pen again, but his books are still on the floor and this draws his attention first. He leans down to gather up an armful of the largest stack, though Pen, with her command of Forces, may be much quicker than he is.
This glance to her then, regarding trees for the forest. There is this consideration, and he says, "I could see myself doing that. I hope to learn other things first, because I...well." He runs his thumb over the spine of one of the books as though it were a little cat curled in his arms. "Back when you were telling me about that other Flambeau, and I told you it was hard to see other people give up their power? I realized that I've done that. I'm trying not to do that."
He moves toward the shelf then, even as he speaks, trying to keep the books in some semblance of order so he can transfer them all back to the shelf. As has been established, he is not a master of coordination, and this is a precarious task at best. "What do you want to learn next?"
mercury
Pen pauses, turning from the book shelf and leaning against it to cast a querying glance at Nicholas. Before she can ask her question, he has asked his, and Pen stretches, burying her fingers in her own hair, lifting the curls up and piling them atop her head as if this will give her perspective. She cups the back of her own skull, pushing downward gently; it is a stretch for the muscles of her neck, and she can feel the pull, feel the give too.
Perhaps it looks as though Nicholas is going to drop some books; Pen (rather suddenly) strides over to him and puts a steadying hand on the pile in his arms, before carefully taking a couple off the top.
These she puts on the next empty shelf, right where she took them from to begin with.
"Lysander used to say that timing was everything. He never taught it to me; not the Art of it. I believe I want to learn Ars Temporis."
crow
Pen moves over to Nick before he can lose his grip on two of the books at the end (they're slippery things) and the entire collection can come crashing to the floor. She pulls a few off of the top, where the pile was beginning to waver and sway, and the look he sends her is a grateful one as she puts them back on the shelf. He puts the ones he is carrying, too, back on the shelf near hers.
He then moves toward one of the other piles, hefting them up from the ground. This movement at least is easier; he spent a considerable amount of time recently in the garden, turning soil and lifting things and throwing them down again.
He glances at Pen over the book pile. "Would you try to contact Lysander to learn that from him?"
mercury
"No." Now that most of the books are back in their homes Pen moves the cracked leather red chair back to its place before the desk and then curls up on the arm chair in the corner, which mercifully was not flung around the study with Ars Essentiae. Her elbow makes an indent in the leather back, up high but not quite on the top, and she rests her head on her palm and with her other hand kneads her heel. "I will always be his student; he will always be my master. But I am no longer in his classroom, and he no longer grades my papers. Besides," Pen begins to smile, giving Nicholas a look: a rake up and down.
crow
The books have reclaimed their residence on his shelves, and his study is once more back in order. Nick watches Pen as she takes a seat in his armchair, and then he moves over and has a seat on its arm nearest her feet. She begins to smile then, and his surprise as she looks him over a palpable thing: she has caught him off guard. "You want me to teach you?" A beat. "I mean, I would...I would really like to teach you." Honest. Just: surprised.
mercury
Nicholas alights; Pen shifts so she is looking at him, her rake of a glance cast somewhat over her shoulder at a soft angle. In Pen's eyes is a sea-current, somehow akin to twilight, a spring-tide - see it - as she watches the man she decided (chosen) to stay by and to cleave to.
"Why would you really like to teach me?"
crow
Nick sits with his spine aligned with the seatback, one leg folded up against his chest and his elbow crooked against it, his jawline in sharp relief as he looks down at her; all angles, just now. She asks him this and his expression muddies for a moment, until the thing that becomes clear is a little surprised, this realization, and amused. "You've figured out my tricks," he says, and reaches down to gently squeeze one of her toes.
He answers her, though, and as he does his eyes find hers and his expression is a more serious thing. "I want us to be able to share this part of our lives together more. And I..." This pause as he looks for words and finds them. "I want to love magick again. The way you do."
mercury
There is an instant when she does not recognize what he means by his tricks because she is guileless in truth; the instant passes, and what was guileless becomes a suggestive arc of her eyebrows. A smile neat as a peeling knife, slipping under the skin of an apple.
That's right. She stole your trick.
Pen leaves off kneading her heel and leaves off resting her head, heavy, on her palm; she sets her back against the corner of the armchair opposite Nicholas's perch, and brings her knees up lets them rest against the chair back. Loops one arm around her knees; reaches out with the other to trace a finger down Nicholas's arm, the easiest thing for her finger to touch settled as she is.
"What do you feel for magick?"
Of course she remembers Nicholas after Liz. And Nicholas, after he came home again from Euthanatos business. She remembers Nicholas in Quiet or just-fresh from Quiet.
But magick -
"Right now." The fervent note in her voice says this is a time sensitive question.
crow
He meets her eyes and that neat little smile, and there's something he finds incredibly endearing about this look Pen gives him, and it earns a rare smile-with-teeth, a quick flash of white. This is also a promise though: sooner or later Nicholas will find a way to turn this car right on back around.
It's something of a game to him, even if and when the topic happens to be serious in nature.
What does he feel - right now, and what could have been a longer and less defined answer becomes by necessity this instinctive: "Right now, at this moment, I love it again." Because they did just share this joy in new knowledge, they played this game and he reveled in new sight and marveled at what Pen was able to do.
mercury
"Tell me what it was like when you were in love with it before," Pen says. "Tell me why you..." and Pen wants his wrist. Will deign to lift her shoulders from the arm chair an inch if that inch is necessary to reaching it, and will trail the river of veins there. "Just talk to me."
crow
Pen wants his wrist, and Nicholas allows her to take hold of it and trace the veins just visible beneath his skin. And Nick wants to be closer to Pen, and so after a moment he slides into this space in the chair that has been left by her tucking her knees up, sitting more or less on top of her feet. And he tucks himself up too, so that they can both sit here balled on his armchair together like a pair of cats in the afternoon sun. He drapes his arm around her knees, leaving his wrist turned up so she can continue to trace it if she desires.
Nick leans his head against the chair's back, and his curls almost cling to the leather like a dark wandering ivy. "Before, I just wanted to explore and do new things," he says. "It felt...I don't know. More full of wonder, to me. To be able to do all of these new things and feel...as though no matter what else happened, there was this entire world out there that was completely alive and full of things I didn't know."
There is this span of heartbeats, and she can see the muscles in his throat work as he swallows. "After everything, I think it just became a tool. It feels...burdensome to me, most of the time."
mercury
He will not be surprised when she does not move to make room for him. Making room for him is not the point of tonight's play. Pen tore a door in the air to walk to him. He closed his eyes but saw her and the obstacle course she made for him to navigate regardless. How can wizards who practice this Art ever be far without wanting to be? And Pen likes, when it comes to Nicholas, to have shared space rather than personal space, will and has weather an awkward position for the pleasure of keeping it in order to stay entangled. Pen likes the closeness likes to touch and be touched. She does still desire to run her finger along his wrist and her gaze cants down to follow her finger's progress as she listens (whole-hearted, concentrating) to Nicholas's answer. The same concentration she brings to bear on her studies is the concentration she brings to bear on her friends. Up from the wrist to through the valley between the mount of Venus and the plain of the Moon where the life and fate lines begin. She follows those, and looks up as she does.
This span of heartbeats, after all. She watches Nicholas's profile, and is quite soberly struck by how she would paint him now if she had the skill to do what she half-thinks of any justice at all. She does not have the skill. She might try anyway, later on, if she remembers. When the muscles in his throat work her instinct is to touch him there and her toes curl but she chooses not to. Watchful.
"What do you do with your magick that feels most burdensome, Nicholai? Ari and I discussed tools last week, or ..." A wash of color moves under her skin; it is slight. Something about that conversation she does not like to remember, exactly. "Well we touched on this idea of what a tool might be. I know just thinking to yourself that a tool isn't ... inert, that a tool is as much the purpose as the purpose, or as much the road as the road - no no. I'm sorry, I was just remembering what we talked about and it struck me here, but I am uncertain how to say it in a way that might be helpful here."
crow
The veins wind like rivers beneath his skin, branching out and twisting and meeting once more, and he almost without thinking turns his hand further toward her, upward, to allow her to more carefully trace the lines of his palm. There is still some trace of a blister there at the edge of the Mount nearest his thumb, where the skin was rubbed raw and red from the work he was doing this weekend in the garden.
When it comes to Pen, Nicholas also prefers the shared space, and he closes the gap between them now, leaning forward to place his chin on one of her bent knees. "I want to know what you talked about with Ari," he says, and then, with this little trace of a sigh because he is keeping one of his promises, "after we're done talking about me."
He lifts his chin then, and this widening of the gap is only so it is easier for him to speak. "I think I've just started to see magick as a way to fulfill my responsibilities. As a weapon." And this pause of consideration, because this is one of those things that naming helps with the conception of. "I...I mean, there was Liz. And when I was away. And then helping Jonas - we tracked down and killed another Adept, once, over there. And now everything with the Union. I feel like there's so much that needs to be done, it's easy to lose sight of...well. Magick's other uses begin to feel frivolous and self-indulgent."
mercury
The corner of her mouth carves a half-smile into existence. The half-smile is the kind of smile you could prick your thumb on and bleed for, but sharp as it is the sharpness finds no echoing gleam in her eyes. They hold a different expression, something (steadfast) - softer. And if Nicholas is looking her in the eye she holds his eyes (incantatory [witch]) for a moment. And then her gaze will fall star-quick, and her head will follow her neck bent, and he will be able to see that beneath her lashes her gaze has gone sidelong, considering and private. When her gaze lifts again, her head is still canted downward; gravity is too much to bear; or he is just exerting some kind of magnetic pull. Here is the evidence of it in her posture.
"You sound a bit like some of my colleagues." She means other Flambeau, specifically, or Hermetics in general. "I think that most everybody, when they settle like people do - you know, sedimentary - into an idea of who they need to be, that is everybody who fights against - I think they all feel that way sometimes. Just that word: frivolous. It has so many bad connotations; we Name it frivolous and it becomes a wasted resource; unnecessary for the act of sustainment."
"What was the last thing you did with your Magick? Before, I mean, learning - " and here is the quick-flash curl of a smile; it has something of resplendence to it. " - how to feel where you are in a crowded world."
crow
Pen's gaze goes sidelong, and Nick's eyes follow it for this moment - but there are all sorts of things she could be thinking about just now. Whatever she talked about with Ari, or something he's made her think of, or Elizabeth Courtright and what it had been like at the end. (And here, at this thought, here, Nick's breath catches, because he has been hearing more than once about this reformed widderslainte, and he has asked: do you think it's really possible. [For every choice, its consequence.])
He thinks about tracing his fingers over the line of her jaw and her neck and touching her hair, when her head is canted toward him like that. He doesn't. Instead: she says he sounds a bit like some of her colleagues, meaning the Flambeau, and there is this laugh that is tinged with disbelief. Just a little. Her question comes before his response to all else that she said.
And note: he has to think about it a little bit. "I use Sight sometimes at work," he says, and his hesitance in saying this is because: you would think he'd learned his lesson that one time, he knows it's dangerous and particularly now, and yet he does it because it helps in a way his Sleeper colleagues don't have and that's hard to resist. "A couple of weeks ago I went out hiking and talked to a spirit at the river. Not for very long - I'm still new. I just wanted to know what it was like around here."
mercury
"Hmm. Did speaking to the river spirit - " pause, as she checks herself: he didn't say it was a river spirit, just a spirit at the river. "Did speaking to the spirit, who might not be a river spirit, feel like work done only for work's sake?"
crow
"It was a river spirit," Nick says, and here he smiles because he'd seen her check herself. "Not always, when I go to the river, but this one was." He's still angled below her, she's looking down at him, and there is this moment of contemplation where his eyes flick off to the side. She can see it through the dark bar of his eyelashes (long, the way they say that these sorts of things are always wasted on men.) "It didn't feel only like work done for work's sake. But," a little smile here, "it was also one of the things I did after we talked, because I've been making the effort."
His chin falls back on her knee again, and he looks up at her once more. "I think it's going to get better, Pen. You should tell me about what you talked about with Ari."
mercury
[MANIP SUBT. I would use willpower, but might wanna do some more magick in this scene, so withholding.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 6, 6) ( success x 2 )
crow
[Empathy!]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) [Doubling Tens]
mercury
"Of course it will get better." The cant of her head, to the side rather than up, is almost haughty; is probably haughty. After all, she is a Hermetic. What it is instead is faithful: devout, even - and certain.
"We should go swimming in a river," Pen says. "Somewhere we can become 'fractal, finned by leaf and light,'" an air of a quotation at the end.
She makes the minute shift necessary to bump her forehead against Nicholas's. "I'll talk about that in a moment." Calm and collected Penelope, but: he can read the tell-tale signs that she is abashed by, or uncomfortable (worm in the apple), about something relating to her conversation with Ari, and not eager to wrap her thoughts around it again.
"First... it sounds to me as though you need to do more than See, for your own self, and that is what will actually make you feel better. More play, too, but that's obvious. I just think... you could Effect more," and she finds his hand again, pressing into his palm, "with your own hands and that might be better."
"Will you really teach me the Art of Time?"
crow
"I would like that," he says, of swimming in rivers. Another drift of his gaze, momentary, though this may be him going inward. "We should...there are so many things to do, Pen. I want to do all of them."
And that is when her forehead bumps against his, and this is when he smiles again, though it shades into something softer, tender even, when he notices that discomfort there in her expression. He notices that she's troubled, and this is an unusual way to come away from a conversation with Ari. One of his hands rises to cup her knee, and he rubs it gently, spreading the warmth of his palm around.
"I do need to Effect more. I've been...I keep planning to go off into the woods more and explore more of the area," he says. A beat. "Of course I'll teach you the Ars Temporis."
mercury
"Now? Tonight? Yesterday?" Pen (the provocateur), her voice tempered by slyness. Yesterday is a whisper, and she smiles just after: a very slow smile, which resists suppression in spite of her very best effort. "Let it be that I have learned Ars Temporis yesterday," Pen says, and closes her eyes and closes her eyes and keeps her eyes closed and bites biting the side of her lip. A beat; she opens one eye, and then the next. Her eyes shift to one side, and then to the next, like one of those cat-clocks from the 1950s. "How long were my eyes closed? Drat; I think it mustn't have worked yet."
crow
Pen is coy, and her slow smile draws one out of him too (has he stopped, tonight?) "I don't have the skill to turn time back yet, but when I do, maybe I'll go back to yesterday and teach you then just to make it reality. It would almost be worth it."
The smile has faded; the gentle amusement remains. "What would you like to do with Time? Would you like to be able to see forward and back?"
mercury
"Oh. I want to be able to steal it," Pen says, after a brief pause. Her eyes are closed again; she keeps them closed as she answers. If his chin is on her knees, she is content; if it is not, she reaches between them to find his ankle and walk her fingers up his shinbone before her hand slides down again to circle. "And use it whenever I please. I want to do more than anybody else can in a minute, because my minute is three minutes. I want to - I do want to be able to see forward. I want to know when it will be auspicious to - not just whether or not it IS auspicious to. I'd like to know exactly how long has passed, although I will probably still say 'it has been a fell eternity since you Nicholas Hyde have held my hand have made the bed have been last seen,' even if I can know it's only been three hours."
crow
His chin is indeed still on her knees, though he takes a moment to wiggle into a more comfortable position, which ends with him slightly curled into the back of the chair. He has wrapped an arm around and under her calves, seemingly determined to tangle the two of them up as much as possible while he listens. "I think you're seeing forward into a time where I make the bed with more regularity, maybe," he says, and his smile is quick. "It must be working."
His thumb sketches a gentle line along the muscle in her calf. "I'd like to hear more about you, Pen. We've been talking so much about me." And this focus on him has been uncomfortable for him, this is true: however, there is still something earnest in his expression, should she look at him just then.
mercury
Pen opens her eyes, but her lids stay low, her dark lashes (burnished) swept a shield or a battlement from which she regards her kingdom. A beat.
She takes a very deep, slow breath; her chest expands. Exhale, not all at once, but slowly too. "The conversation I alluded to earlier with Ari was one in which I was catching her up on events, and asking her to make some charms to shield," Pen taps her own temple, twice. "If I am to meet a conventionalist, it seems wise to have some on hand; do you not think so?"
The query is not quite rhetorical; she blinks.
Then says, "We spoke about instruments, tools that is, this is what I thought about earlier. Anyway, we spoke about tools - or I spoke about tools - after some metaphorical fancy-flight about greatness. She called me -- huh," Pen blows at her bangs. Speaking of deep, deep discomfort, Pen wriggles closer (how?) to Nicholas, lowering her voice so it is barely a voice. "I didn't like it."
crow
"I think running into one is only a matter of time, now, and charms would be helpful to have."
Pen is wriggling closer to Nick, or at least trying, so Nick - well, here come the cuddle acrobatics. He (still listening, mark) wiggles around to sit more fully against the back of the chair, hooking one of his legs around Pen and shifting so that she is seated between his legs, not quite in his lap, with her side and possibly her back against his stomach and chest, and here he can embrace her more fully. Which he does, leaving one hand where it was on her knee and curving the other around her back.
He has executed these sorts of maneuvers often enough that it's not especially noteworthy and didn't take any kind of especial effort, and it is not difficult for him to return eye contact as she speaks.
The rest of what Pen says: well, there are a few ways it could be interpreted. Nick's first impulse, this stirring of mirth in his gut, is to assume that Pen is made uncomfortable by someone else calling her great, which she is. This is chased away by the other possible meaning, which is that Ari implied Pen was a tool for something else - for greatness, perhaps. So here Nick leans in to her barely-a-voice, and perhaps the gesture is not even a conscious thing. "What did she call you?"
mercury
His first instinct is correct (and perhaps his second instinct, too, given the metaphorical flights Ari and Pen took together). Pen's arm has looped around Nicholas's shoulders, her elbow crooked, other hand come to rest a-grip at his thigh: anybody from the future scrying back through the lives of Penelope Mars, Flambeau, and Nick Hyde, Chakravanti, would have a number of tiresome or titillating such scenes to comb through - scrying is work best helped along with some good fortune.
Pen wrinkles her nose like a boy in a 1960s kid's show told to let the girls play. "She called me - " a sharp sigh; she doesn't want to say it. What does it mean that she doesn't want to say it?
"Well," temporizing. "Essentially, I think she warned me against being an Icarus - and maybe I will be an Icarus one day. I can envision that, almost. I would like to think I am far too wise to be heedless of clear warnings, but who knows? But she called me great - or or," rush-through, "said that there was - is - greatness," unloops her arm in order to very dangerously gesture (almost take out Nick's ear, gesturing like that, lop his head right off).
"And ... As if it wasn't the same for her. Or you! Not really you; we weren't talking about you. But..." Trail away; she loops her arm around Nick's neck again.
And pouts, very sincerely.
crow
[I just cannot. WP because trying.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 5 ) [WP]
mercury
[-_- remembered -2 diff!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN4 (1, 5, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )
crow
Penelope: very sincerely pouts. And mirth, it has this tendency to bubble and fizz out of people like champagne that wasn't allowed to breathe properly, and Nicholas has to choke it down. It wouldn't have been unkindly meant, a thing borne of affection and perhaps a little amazement that someone as obviously Destined as Pen might not recognize it, or might even actively resist it. Pen is on her game tonight, but she still can't see the effort he puts into this gentle, wistfully affectionate look he gives her as he settles so her arm can find its way more easily around his shoulders.
No laughter. None. Because he's being sensitive, and recognizes her vulnerability (ridiculous though it may be), and knows that even laughter kindly meant can rankle in the face of that.
"Maybe there are specific kinds of greatness," he says, and - here's where the wistfulness was, but he'll return to it - he lightly traces his fingertips up her spine to her shoulderblades, as though he's looking for wings. "And maybe you're differently great than Ari. Or me. What didn't you like about it?"
mercury
Pen gives him a clear-eyed, observant look - measures the span of his cheekbones, the steadiness of his eyes, the hitch of his breath in his chest. She does not see the laughter; her lower lip firms and she twists her mouth to the side.
"I don't know," Pen says. "The way she said it. The way she removed herself from greatness, while foisting it off on me, maybe - " a faint smile. This isn't exactly it, but close. She does not think Arianna 'foists' anything off on her. "And no no, greatness is an idea - it can be expressed many different ways, but it is only one idea when you get down to it, isn't it? Perhaps greatness can happen in a moment, but it isn't... oh I just don't know. What do you think about greatness, Crow?"
crow
"I think that it's part of the true nature of greatness to not recognize itself at first," he says, and his eyes are indeed steady here, and he does not hide how fond he is of Pen just now. He has found a lock of her hair, gently caught it between thumb and forefinger, and he winds it around his finger and does not look at the gleam today because his eyes are on hers. "Because it has to be forged and tempered, and through the smoke and fire and hammer it's hard not to notice all the places where you're still misshapen."
This thoughtful lingering on one of the knobs of her spine. "But you didn't answer my question. What don't you like about it?"
mercury
Many couples come together and drift apart later on. Fondness right now does not guarantee fondness later, even if one vows oneself to another using Essentiae, even if one is so certain they're willing to make an oath count: being foresworn is no risk. Pen has a forge for metal-working down in the cellar, and she smiles faintly (gravely, though) at Nicholas's chosen metaphor. The smile dissipates, swirls up like a kick of sparks. "I don't know. Do you have an idea about what it is I don't like?"
Her tone isn't as challenging as it could be - rather, it is open, open. Chalice-tone, a querying cant of her chin.
crow
Pen's tone is open, and maybe he has caught the gravity of her smile, because there is something in the muscles around his cheekbones that relaxes - any lingering humor dissipates like steam before a forge. "The idea that if you're great and we aren't..." And here he trails off. When he finds his voice again it's to say, "My ideas about what it might be don't matter, Pen. I want...I want to understand what it is that's bothering you."
mercury
Pen is wistful; it would be cowardice to kiss Nicholas right now; she is already touching, and being touched by, him; it would be cowardice to say any wild thing; it would be wrong. Pen's gaze stays steady on her consort's (let's use the more archaic term) gaze, though she marks the subtle change in his expression: it conjures up a note of yearning in her own. Pen traces a line down the left side of his throat and her gaze goes sidelong, rests on his finger and her hair there-wrapped, but lets what is in the foreground blur. "I do too. Well no I don't, it is bothersome; I want it to go! But I thought your perspective might rally my own; so see, it could too matter; we won't now until it is tried." Her eyes find his again and here is this curl of a smile. "'If' I'm great and you, plural, aren't. Perhaps it is that, when Ari said the greatness in me, how I rush to meet it," and god, Pen hates repeating this, hates it enough that her fingers tighten on Nicholas and dig into his skin and her shoulders stiffen and her collar rises and there's just this rise it gets a rise out of her. She is not humble; she is a fucking Hermetic. Yet. "It is ... bothersome, to imagine greatness as a single point to reach, and I hate that she would separate herself from it if she won't separate me from it too. It's wrong."
crow
Vivienne predicted whatever Nicholas imagines this conversation to be, and more like it. Vivienne said - well. It doesn't matter what Vivienne said. He had told her at the time that it hurt him, that she was being cruel, all the while knowing on some level that she would rather see him cage himself than watch him die again. It doesn't matter whether that would happen, what the risk or likelihood is: the point is, sometimes our deepest fears stay with us.
"Do you worry that greatness means sacrifice? Or that it means growing apart from the things you love?" Nick feels her fingers digging into his shoulder, and he swallows again, though with the way his head is angled now she won't see the way his throat is working. "I think...when we talked before and you told me I'd have to be Michelangelo, I think what I was trying to say then is that I'm afraid that chasing greatness means giving up everything that I have right now. Or that it will mean that for you, too. Or that when I see people who I think of as great, I always notice that they seem to be alone."
mercury
[I think it is time for - Enochian?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 5 ) [Doubling Tens]
mercury
[And - Char + Expression? WP probably unnecessary but characters spend where they wanna spend.]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 8, 9) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens] [WP]
mercury
Pen adjusts her weight (leaning harder into Nicholas's torso her hip heavy against his inner thigh) and scribes a more deliberate circle around Nicholas with her arms. The one around his neck: adjusts. Her other hand has left his thigh and proceeded to leave his arm and ribs alone but also circles, like so. Their rings are circles and doors from one place to another are circles and they like to be encircled by one another and now Pen has encircled him (ensorcelled is another way to say beguiled is another way to say enchanted) in a manner so deliberate and so ardent it would be difficult not to notice the symbol. "Nicholas."
Pen follows the deliberate cadence of his name with a word. He knows she is speaking Enochian. Has heard it enough to know it: she says whatever she says in Enochian with great care. The subtleties and nuances the angelic tongue allows one [Poetry (Truth)] are captured: he does not know whatever it is she says, but she wants him to at least get a sense of it: the look in her eyes - some people never get to be looked at like that. The tone of her voice - some people never hear how beloved they are, never hear the ache a certain kind of (clear [she thinks clear]) sightedness gives one person for another. There are a lot of nuances he doesn't get: she can't give him. But the quirk up of her mouth and the Mystery there-in is promising, isn't it? Even if it is gentle, too. "Nicholas," again.
And once more, for fairy tale logic's sake, "Handsome Crow."
"What I said about being Michelangelo, and Michelangelo's angel, what you said then. I heard it. And - no. No, I don't think about it. If 'it' is greatness. I mean I used to think about being great but I don't think about reaching greatness now. I don't believe I am great, but I don't believe I'm not great. What I want is to be good. I want to be as good as I can be and I want help make the world good and others too - I want you to be so good."
"I mean greatness comes after, doesn't it? It's the shadow you leave behind."
"You and I, we are not going to be alone. I, god - !" This sharp little hitch to her voice; a break. Fervent: "Wish for a muse right now to possess my tongue and give me fairer speech, or a clearer mind. Maybe greatness means sacrifice. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it depends on the greatness, but growing apart from the things you love - the people. That's too paltry; too …" Somewhat helpless in this. "I don't believe in it for me. Maybe it's a danger, but I don't choose it, so it will not happen."
"I just don't think about it. I don't want to be the kind of Mage who believes that they are great. I know my tradition has a reputation for pride; an unfair reputation, sometimes, when held up in relation to other traditions - but still it is a reputation and sometimes it is a fair one. It feels easy. And I don't want to be the kind of Mage who is alone. But I find it difficult to believe that people who are great are always alone; who do you consider to be great?"
crow
Pen encircles him, and almost without thinking he has linked his hands and done the same -
Some people never get to hear the way she speaks to him now. Hearing her speak Enochian always wakens something in him, perhaps some longing to match her own, grasping at the nuance and the Truth of it. And so he listens.
There: he finds some peace in what she says, even if the only true peace is death. "I also want to be good," he says. The rest, it stirs something within him, though it is too much for him to articulate just now, and too much for him to begin to fully understand what it means. He does his best to eke it out, to define enough to share.
What he finds is, "I think that's what Ari means, Pen. You already cast a shadow - you inspire goodness in others. You inspire me. Maybe you don't want to hear that because you know you have more to do still, that your shadow could be longer, but I think that's the greatness we both see in you. And it's like no one else I know."
And it's true that some people never get to be looked at like that. "As to your question...I think maybe until I heard you, I was still confusing power with greatness."
mercury
"Sometimes they go hand in hand," Penelope says, and then: shift. It's a tentative shift, light-struck glancing across a lake-surface; she angles her head just so, looks at Nicholas from under her eyelashes. "But you know..." sly as a fox again, elongating the 'o' in 'know. "Today I feel powerful.We are powerful. I opened a gate, Nicholas!" That elation, see, it works itself through her again: "And you can feel where to go, even when you're blind!" Pen touches her nose to Nick's presses her mouth to his for a (quiet [ardent]) moment and then licks Nicholas's cheek. That's right: licks it! "I don't mind hearing that I inspire you; you inspire me."
crow
This sly look from Pen, and Nick has the sense that she, just before she says it - and she does. He meets that look, and at what she says he laughs. "Full circle. Very nice." And if she hadn't kissed him then he would've kissed her, so it's just as well.
She licks his cheek, and he can't quite hide the surprise that accompanies his laughter this time, either at that or that, apparently, he inspires her too. He has gotten better about accepting this when she says it through the years; perhaps he has begun to believe it, in truth. "Do you still dislike it? What Ari said."
mercury
"Yes. I mean: I still disliked it when she said it. I don't know how I might react if she says it again or you say it again; perhaps you should talk to me about how great I am." And here: she kisses him again, but deeper.
This she does not judge to be cowardice; she's giving him space to think, eh?
crow
Space to think. Sure. When he pulls back it's with a little reluctance, and he was leaning into her and is still, and that space could be closed again in half a heartbeat. Might be. "You do lead both of us, you know. I think...you show us both what's possible while you forge on ahead." A beat. "I don't think I told you, but you charging in and directing that meeting about Alex in a room full of strangers was really hot."
Though: he is still thinking, and perhaps she can see that. Something of what she relayed to him of her conversation with Ari is still tugging at him. Will, perhaps, for a while yet. So instead, his smile could cut if it wanted, though his eyes are still warm. "I'm not articulating myself well. Can I just show you instead?"
mercury
They have a lot of time (Hope) to argue over some of these points. He is still circled by her arms although it is a binding circle now instead of a guarding circle. Pen feels no urgency to dismantle what she disagrees with right now; she smiles in a way that her cheeks feel; it is vibrant; so is her surprised laughter, on a quick exhale, when he calls her 'directing' that meeting about Alex hot; and so are her eyes, in spite of the pensive shadow there. The reflective (lake-light, moon-water in a chalice - ) quality.
"Show me," she says. "Let's see you."
(And so it goes.)
Nick sits with his spine aligned with the seatback, one leg folded up against his chest and his elbow crooked against it, his jawline in sharp relief as he looks down at her; all angles, just now. She asks him this and his expression muddies for a moment, until the thing that becomes clear is a little surprised, this realization, and amused. "You've figured out my tricks," he says, and reaches down to gently squeeze one of her toes.
He answers her, though, and as he does his eyes find hers and his expression is a more serious thing. "I want us to be able to share this part of our lives together more. And I..." This pause as he looks for words and finds them. "I want to love magick again. The way you do."
mercury
There is an instant when she does not recognize what he means by his tricks because she is guileless in truth; the instant passes, and what was guileless becomes a suggestive arc of her eyebrows. A smile neat as a peeling knife, slipping under the skin of an apple.
That's right. She stole your trick.
Pen leaves off kneading her heel and leaves off resting her head, heavy, on her palm; she sets her back against the corner of the armchair opposite Nicholas's perch, and brings her knees up lets them rest against the chair back. Loops one arm around her knees; reaches out with the other to trace a finger down Nicholas's arm, the easiest thing for her finger to touch settled as she is.
"What do you feel for magick?"
Of course she remembers Nicholas after Liz. And Nicholas, after he came home again from Euthanatos business. She remembers Nicholas in Quiet or just-fresh from Quiet.
But magick -
"Right now." The fervent note in her voice says this is a time sensitive question.
crow
He meets her eyes and that neat little smile, and there's something he finds incredibly endearing about this look Pen gives him, and it earns a rare smile-with-teeth, a quick flash of white. This is also a promise though: sooner or later Nicholas will find a way to turn this car right on back around.
It's something of a game to him, even if and when the topic happens to be serious in nature.
What does he feel - right now, and what could have been a longer and less defined answer becomes by necessity this instinctive: "Right now, at this moment, I love it again." Because they did just share this joy in new knowledge, they played this game and he reveled in new sight and marveled at what Pen was able to do.
mercury
"Tell me what it was like when you were in love with it before," Pen says. "Tell me why you..." and Pen wants his wrist. Will deign to lift her shoulders from the arm chair an inch if that inch is necessary to reaching it, and will trail the river of veins there. "Just talk to me."
crow
Pen wants his wrist, and Nicholas allows her to take hold of it and trace the veins just visible beneath his skin. And Nick wants to be closer to Pen, and so after a moment he slides into this space in the chair that has been left by her tucking her knees up, sitting more or less on top of her feet. And he tucks himself up too, so that they can both sit here balled on his armchair together like a pair of cats in the afternoon sun. He drapes his arm around her knees, leaving his wrist turned up so she can continue to trace it if she desires.
Nick leans his head against the chair's back, and his curls almost cling to the leather like a dark wandering ivy. "Before, I just wanted to explore and do new things," he says. "It felt...I don't know. More full of wonder, to me. To be able to do all of these new things and feel...as though no matter what else happened, there was this entire world out there that was completely alive and full of things I didn't know."
There is this span of heartbeats, and she can see the muscles in his throat work as he swallows. "After everything, I think it just became a tool. It feels...burdensome to me, most of the time."
mercury
He will not be surprised when she does not move to make room for him. Making room for him is not the point of tonight's play. Pen tore a door in the air to walk to him. He closed his eyes but saw her and the obstacle course she made for him to navigate regardless. How can wizards who practice this Art ever be far without wanting to be? And Pen likes, when it comes to Nicholas, to have shared space rather than personal space, will and has weather an awkward position for the pleasure of keeping it in order to stay entangled. Pen likes the closeness likes to touch and be touched. She does still desire to run her finger along his wrist and her gaze cants down to follow her finger's progress as she listens (whole-hearted, concentrating) to Nicholas's answer. The same concentration she brings to bear on her studies is the concentration she brings to bear on her friends. Up from the wrist to through the valley between the mount of Venus and the plain of the Moon where the life and fate lines begin. She follows those, and looks up as she does.
This span of heartbeats, after all. She watches Nicholas's profile, and is quite soberly struck by how she would paint him now if she had the skill to do what she half-thinks of any justice at all. She does not have the skill. She might try anyway, later on, if she remembers. When the muscles in his throat work her instinct is to touch him there and her toes curl but she chooses not to. Watchful.
"What do you do with your magick that feels most burdensome, Nicholai? Ari and I discussed tools last week, or ..." A wash of color moves under her skin; it is slight. Something about that conversation she does not like to remember, exactly. "Well we touched on this idea of what a tool might be. I know just thinking to yourself that a tool isn't ... inert, that a tool is as much the purpose as the purpose, or as much the road as the road - no no. I'm sorry, I was just remembering what we talked about and it struck me here, but I am uncertain how to say it in a way that might be helpful here."
crow
The veins wind like rivers beneath his skin, branching out and twisting and meeting once more, and he almost without thinking turns his hand further toward her, upward, to allow her to more carefully trace the lines of his palm. There is still some trace of a blister there at the edge of the Mount nearest his thumb, where the skin was rubbed raw and red from the work he was doing this weekend in the garden.
When it comes to Pen, Nicholas also prefers the shared space, and he closes the gap between them now, leaning forward to place his chin on one of her bent knees. "I want to know what you talked about with Ari," he says, and then, with this little trace of a sigh because he is keeping one of his promises, "after we're done talking about me."
He lifts his chin then, and this widening of the gap is only so it is easier for him to speak. "I think I've just started to see magick as a way to fulfill my responsibilities. As a weapon." And this pause of consideration, because this is one of those things that naming helps with the conception of. "I...I mean, there was Liz. And when I was away. And then helping Jonas - we tracked down and killed another Adept, once, over there. And now everything with the Union. I feel like there's so much that needs to be done, it's easy to lose sight of...well. Magick's other uses begin to feel frivolous and self-indulgent."
mercury
The corner of her mouth carves a half-smile into existence. The half-smile is the kind of smile you could prick your thumb on and bleed for, but sharp as it is the sharpness finds no echoing gleam in her eyes. They hold a different expression, something (steadfast) - softer. And if Nicholas is looking her in the eye she holds his eyes (incantatory [witch]) for a moment. And then her gaze will fall star-quick, and her head will follow her neck bent, and he will be able to see that beneath her lashes her gaze has gone sidelong, considering and private. When her gaze lifts again, her head is still canted downward; gravity is too much to bear; or he is just exerting some kind of magnetic pull. Here is the evidence of it in her posture.
"You sound a bit like some of my colleagues." She means other Flambeau, specifically, or Hermetics in general. "I think that most everybody, when they settle like people do - you know, sedimentary - into an idea of who they need to be, that is everybody who fights against - I think they all feel that way sometimes. Just that word: frivolous. It has so many bad connotations; we Name it frivolous and it becomes a wasted resource; unnecessary for the act of sustainment."
"What was the last thing you did with your Magick? Before, I mean, learning - " and here is the quick-flash curl of a smile; it has something of resplendence to it. " - how to feel where you are in a crowded world."
crow
Pen's gaze goes sidelong, and Nick's eyes follow it for this moment - but there are all sorts of things she could be thinking about just now. Whatever she talked about with Ari, or something he's made her think of, or Elizabeth Courtright and what it had been like at the end. (And here, at this thought, here, Nick's breath catches, because he has been hearing more than once about this reformed widderslainte, and he has asked: do you think it's really possible. [For every choice, its consequence.])
He thinks about tracing his fingers over the line of her jaw and her neck and touching her hair, when her head is canted toward him like that. He doesn't. Instead: she says he sounds a bit like some of her colleagues, meaning the Flambeau, and there is this laugh that is tinged with disbelief. Just a little. Her question comes before his response to all else that she said.
And note: he has to think about it a little bit. "I use Sight sometimes at work," he says, and his hesitance in saying this is because: you would think he'd learned his lesson that one time, he knows it's dangerous and particularly now, and yet he does it because it helps in a way his Sleeper colleagues don't have and that's hard to resist. "A couple of weeks ago I went out hiking and talked to a spirit at the river. Not for very long - I'm still new. I just wanted to know what it was like around here."
mercury
"Hmm. Did speaking to the river spirit - " pause, as she checks herself: he didn't say it was a river spirit, just a spirit at the river. "Did speaking to the spirit, who might not be a river spirit, feel like work done only for work's sake?"
crow
"It was a river spirit," Nick says, and here he smiles because he'd seen her check herself. "Not always, when I go to the river, but this one was." He's still angled below her, she's looking down at him, and there is this moment of contemplation where his eyes flick off to the side. She can see it through the dark bar of his eyelashes (long, the way they say that these sorts of things are always wasted on men.) "It didn't feel only like work done for work's sake. But," a little smile here, "it was also one of the things I did after we talked, because I've been making the effort."
His chin falls back on her knee again, and he looks up at her once more. "I think it's going to get better, Pen. You should tell me about what you talked about with Ari."
mercury
[MANIP SUBT. I would use willpower, but might wanna do some more magick in this scene, so withholding.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 6, 6) ( success x 2 )
crow
[Empathy!]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) [Doubling Tens]
mercury
"Of course it will get better." The cant of her head, to the side rather than up, is almost haughty; is probably haughty. After all, she is a Hermetic. What it is instead is faithful: devout, even - and certain.
"We should go swimming in a river," Pen says. "Somewhere we can become 'fractal, finned by leaf and light,'" an air of a quotation at the end.
She makes the minute shift necessary to bump her forehead against Nicholas's. "I'll talk about that in a moment." Calm and collected Penelope, but: he can read the tell-tale signs that she is abashed by, or uncomfortable (worm in the apple), about something relating to her conversation with Ari, and not eager to wrap her thoughts around it again.
"First... it sounds to me as though you need to do more than See, for your own self, and that is what will actually make you feel better. More play, too, but that's obvious. I just think... you could Effect more," and she finds his hand again, pressing into his palm, "with your own hands and that might be better."
"Will you really teach me the Art of Time?"
crow
"I would like that," he says, of swimming in rivers. Another drift of his gaze, momentary, though this may be him going inward. "We should...there are so many things to do, Pen. I want to do all of them."
And that is when her forehead bumps against his, and this is when he smiles again, though it shades into something softer, tender even, when he notices that discomfort there in her expression. He notices that she's troubled, and this is an unusual way to come away from a conversation with Ari. One of his hands rises to cup her knee, and he rubs it gently, spreading the warmth of his palm around.
"I do need to Effect more. I've been...I keep planning to go off into the woods more and explore more of the area," he says. A beat. "Of course I'll teach you the Ars Temporis."
mercury
"Now? Tonight? Yesterday?" Pen (the provocateur), her voice tempered by slyness. Yesterday is a whisper, and she smiles just after: a very slow smile, which resists suppression in spite of her very best effort. "Let it be that I have learned Ars Temporis yesterday," Pen says, and closes her eyes and closes her eyes and keeps her eyes closed and bites biting the side of her lip. A beat; she opens one eye, and then the next. Her eyes shift to one side, and then to the next, like one of those cat-clocks from the 1950s. "How long were my eyes closed? Drat; I think it mustn't have worked yet."
crow
Pen is coy, and her slow smile draws one out of him too (has he stopped, tonight?) "I don't have the skill to turn time back yet, but when I do, maybe I'll go back to yesterday and teach you then just to make it reality. It would almost be worth it."
The smile has faded; the gentle amusement remains. "What would you like to do with Time? Would you like to be able to see forward and back?"
mercury
"Oh. I want to be able to steal it," Pen says, after a brief pause. Her eyes are closed again; she keeps them closed as she answers. If his chin is on her knees, she is content; if it is not, she reaches between them to find his ankle and walk her fingers up his shinbone before her hand slides down again to circle. "And use it whenever I please. I want to do more than anybody else can in a minute, because my minute is three minutes. I want to - I do want to be able to see forward. I want to know when it will be auspicious to - not just whether or not it IS auspicious to. I'd like to know exactly how long has passed, although I will probably still say 'it has been a fell eternity since you Nicholas Hyde have held my hand have made the bed have been last seen,' even if I can know it's only been three hours."
crow
His chin is indeed still on her knees, though he takes a moment to wiggle into a more comfortable position, which ends with him slightly curled into the back of the chair. He has wrapped an arm around and under her calves, seemingly determined to tangle the two of them up as much as possible while he listens. "I think you're seeing forward into a time where I make the bed with more regularity, maybe," he says, and his smile is quick. "It must be working."
His thumb sketches a gentle line along the muscle in her calf. "I'd like to hear more about you, Pen. We've been talking so much about me." And this focus on him has been uncomfortable for him, this is true: however, there is still something earnest in his expression, should she look at him just then.
mercury
Pen opens her eyes, but her lids stay low, her dark lashes (burnished) swept a shield or a battlement from which she regards her kingdom. A beat.
She takes a very deep, slow breath; her chest expands. Exhale, not all at once, but slowly too. "The conversation I alluded to earlier with Ari was one in which I was catching her up on events, and asking her to make some charms to shield," Pen taps her own temple, twice. "If I am to meet a conventionalist, it seems wise to have some on hand; do you not think so?"
The query is not quite rhetorical; she blinks.
Then says, "We spoke about instruments, tools that is, this is what I thought about earlier. Anyway, we spoke about tools - or I spoke about tools - after some metaphorical fancy-flight about greatness. She called me -- huh," Pen blows at her bangs. Speaking of deep, deep discomfort, Pen wriggles closer (how?) to Nicholas, lowering her voice so it is barely a voice. "I didn't like it."
crow
"I think running into one is only a matter of time, now, and charms would be helpful to have."
Pen is wriggling closer to Nick, or at least trying, so Nick - well, here come the cuddle acrobatics. He (still listening, mark) wiggles around to sit more fully against the back of the chair, hooking one of his legs around Pen and shifting so that she is seated between his legs, not quite in his lap, with her side and possibly her back against his stomach and chest, and here he can embrace her more fully. Which he does, leaving one hand where it was on her knee and curving the other around her back.
He has executed these sorts of maneuvers often enough that it's not especially noteworthy and didn't take any kind of especial effort, and it is not difficult for him to return eye contact as she speaks.
The rest of what Pen says: well, there are a few ways it could be interpreted. Nick's first impulse, this stirring of mirth in his gut, is to assume that Pen is made uncomfortable by someone else calling her great, which she is. This is chased away by the other possible meaning, which is that Ari implied Pen was a tool for something else - for greatness, perhaps. So here Nick leans in to her barely-a-voice, and perhaps the gesture is not even a conscious thing. "What did she call you?"
mercury
His first instinct is correct (and perhaps his second instinct, too, given the metaphorical flights Ari and Pen took together). Pen's arm has looped around Nicholas's shoulders, her elbow crooked, other hand come to rest a-grip at his thigh: anybody from the future scrying back through the lives of Penelope Mars, Flambeau, and Nick Hyde, Chakravanti, would have a number of tiresome or titillating such scenes to comb through - scrying is work best helped along with some good fortune.
Pen wrinkles her nose like a boy in a 1960s kid's show told to let the girls play. "She called me - " a sharp sigh; she doesn't want to say it. What does it mean that she doesn't want to say it?
"Well," temporizing. "Essentially, I think she warned me against being an Icarus - and maybe I will be an Icarus one day. I can envision that, almost. I would like to think I am far too wise to be heedless of clear warnings, but who knows? But she called me great - or or," rush-through, "said that there was - is - greatness," unloops her arm in order to very dangerously gesture (almost take out Nick's ear, gesturing like that, lop his head right off).
"And ... As if it wasn't the same for her. Or you! Not really you; we weren't talking about you. But..." Trail away; she loops her arm around Nick's neck again.
And pouts, very sincerely.
crow
[I just cannot. WP because trying.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 5 ) [WP]
mercury
[-_- remembered -2 diff!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN4 (1, 5, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )
crow
Penelope: very sincerely pouts. And mirth, it has this tendency to bubble and fizz out of people like champagne that wasn't allowed to breathe properly, and Nicholas has to choke it down. It wouldn't have been unkindly meant, a thing borne of affection and perhaps a little amazement that someone as obviously Destined as Pen might not recognize it, or might even actively resist it. Pen is on her game tonight, but she still can't see the effort he puts into this gentle, wistfully affectionate look he gives her as he settles so her arm can find its way more easily around his shoulders.
No laughter. None. Because he's being sensitive, and recognizes her vulnerability (ridiculous though it may be), and knows that even laughter kindly meant can rankle in the face of that.
"Maybe there are specific kinds of greatness," he says, and - here's where the wistfulness was, but he'll return to it - he lightly traces his fingertips up her spine to her shoulderblades, as though he's looking for wings. "And maybe you're differently great than Ari. Or me. What didn't you like about it?"
mercury
Pen gives him a clear-eyed, observant look - measures the span of his cheekbones, the steadiness of his eyes, the hitch of his breath in his chest. She does not see the laughter; her lower lip firms and she twists her mouth to the side.
"I don't know," Pen says. "The way she said it. The way she removed herself from greatness, while foisting it off on me, maybe - " a faint smile. This isn't exactly it, but close. She does not think Arianna 'foists' anything off on her. "And no no, greatness is an idea - it can be expressed many different ways, but it is only one idea when you get down to it, isn't it? Perhaps greatness can happen in a moment, but it isn't... oh I just don't know. What do you think about greatness, Crow?"
crow
"I think that it's part of the true nature of greatness to not recognize itself at first," he says, and his eyes are indeed steady here, and he does not hide how fond he is of Pen just now. He has found a lock of her hair, gently caught it between thumb and forefinger, and he winds it around his finger and does not look at the gleam today because his eyes are on hers. "Because it has to be forged and tempered, and through the smoke and fire and hammer it's hard not to notice all the places where you're still misshapen."
This thoughtful lingering on one of the knobs of her spine. "But you didn't answer my question. What don't you like about it?"
mercury
Many couples come together and drift apart later on. Fondness right now does not guarantee fondness later, even if one vows oneself to another using Essentiae, even if one is so certain they're willing to make an oath count: being foresworn is no risk. Pen has a forge for metal-working down in the cellar, and she smiles faintly (gravely, though) at Nicholas's chosen metaphor. The smile dissipates, swirls up like a kick of sparks. "I don't know. Do you have an idea about what it is I don't like?"
Her tone isn't as challenging as it could be - rather, it is open, open. Chalice-tone, a querying cant of her chin.
crow
Pen's tone is open, and maybe he has caught the gravity of her smile, because there is something in the muscles around his cheekbones that relaxes - any lingering humor dissipates like steam before a forge. "The idea that if you're great and we aren't..." And here he trails off. When he finds his voice again it's to say, "My ideas about what it might be don't matter, Pen. I want...I want to understand what it is that's bothering you."
mercury
Pen is wistful; it would be cowardice to kiss Nicholas right now; she is already touching, and being touched by, him; it would be cowardice to say any wild thing; it would be wrong. Pen's gaze stays steady on her consort's (let's use the more archaic term) gaze, though she marks the subtle change in his expression: it conjures up a note of yearning in her own. Pen traces a line down the left side of his throat and her gaze goes sidelong, rests on his finger and her hair there-wrapped, but lets what is in the foreground blur. "I do too. Well no I don't, it is bothersome; I want it to go! But I thought your perspective might rally my own; so see, it could too matter; we won't now until it is tried." Her eyes find his again and here is this curl of a smile. "'If' I'm great and you, plural, aren't. Perhaps it is that, when Ari said the greatness in me, how I rush to meet it," and god, Pen hates repeating this, hates it enough that her fingers tighten on Nicholas and dig into his skin and her shoulders stiffen and her collar rises and there's just this rise it gets a rise out of her. She is not humble; she is a fucking Hermetic. Yet. "It is ... bothersome, to imagine greatness as a single point to reach, and I hate that she would separate herself from it if she won't separate me from it too. It's wrong."
crow
Vivienne predicted whatever Nicholas imagines this conversation to be, and more like it. Vivienne said - well. It doesn't matter what Vivienne said. He had told her at the time that it hurt him, that she was being cruel, all the while knowing on some level that she would rather see him cage himself than watch him die again. It doesn't matter whether that would happen, what the risk or likelihood is: the point is, sometimes our deepest fears stay with us.
"Do you worry that greatness means sacrifice? Or that it means growing apart from the things you love?" Nick feels her fingers digging into his shoulder, and he swallows again, though with the way his head is angled now she won't see the way his throat is working. "I think...when we talked before and you told me I'd have to be Michelangelo, I think what I was trying to say then is that I'm afraid that chasing greatness means giving up everything that I have right now. Or that it will mean that for you, too. Or that when I see people who I think of as great, I always notice that they seem to be alone."
mercury
[I think it is time for - Enochian?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 5 ) [Doubling Tens]
mercury
[And - Char + Expression? WP probably unnecessary but characters spend where they wanna spend.]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 8, 9) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens] [WP]
mercury
Pen adjusts her weight (leaning harder into Nicholas's torso her hip heavy against his inner thigh) and scribes a more deliberate circle around Nicholas with her arms. The one around his neck: adjusts. Her other hand has left his thigh and proceeded to leave his arm and ribs alone but also circles, like so. Their rings are circles and doors from one place to another are circles and they like to be encircled by one another and now Pen has encircled him (ensorcelled is another way to say beguiled is another way to say enchanted) in a manner so deliberate and so ardent it would be difficult not to notice the symbol. "Nicholas."
Pen follows the deliberate cadence of his name with a word. He knows she is speaking Enochian. Has heard it enough to know it: she says whatever she says in Enochian with great care. The subtleties and nuances the angelic tongue allows one [Poetry (Truth)] are captured: he does not know whatever it is she says, but she wants him to at least get a sense of it: the look in her eyes - some people never get to be looked at like that. The tone of her voice - some people never hear how beloved they are, never hear the ache a certain kind of (clear [she thinks clear]) sightedness gives one person for another. There are a lot of nuances he doesn't get: she can't give him. But the quirk up of her mouth and the Mystery there-in is promising, isn't it? Even if it is gentle, too. "Nicholas," again.
And once more, for fairy tale logic's sake, "Handsome Crow."
"What I said about being Michelangelo, and Michelangelo's angel, what you said then. I heard it. And - no. No, I don't think about it. If 'it' is greatness. I mean I used to think about being great but I don't think about reaching greatness now. I don't believe I am great, but I don't believe I'm not great. What I want is to be good. I want to be as good as I can be and I want help make the world good and others too - I want you to be so good."
"I mean greatness comes after, doesn't it? It's the shadow you leave behind."
"You and I, we are not going to be alone. I, god - !" This sharp little hitch to her voice; a break. Fervent: "Wish for a muse right now to possess my tongue and give me fairer speech, or a clearer mind. Maybe greatness means sacrifice. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it depends on the greatness, but growing apart from the things you love - the people. That's too paltry; too …" Somewhat helpless in this. "I don't believe in it for me. Maybe it's a danger, but I don't choose it, so it will not happen."
"I just don't think about it. I don't want to be the kind of Mage who believes that they are great. I know my tradition has a reputation for pride; an unfair reputation, sometimes, when held up in relation to other traditions - but still it is a reputation and sometimes it is a fair one. It feels easy. And I don't want to be the kind of Mage who is alone. But I find it difficult to believe that people who are great are always alone; who do you consider to be great?"
crow
Pen encircles him, and almost without thinking he has linked his hands and done the same -
Some people never get to hear the way she speaks to him now. Hearing her speak Enochian always wakens something in him, perhaps some longing to match her own, grasping at the nuance and the Truth of it. And so he listens.
There: he finds some peace in what she says, even if the only true peace is death. "I also want to be good," he says. The rest, it stirs something within him, though it is too much for him to articulate just now, and too much for him to begin to fully understand what it means. He does his best to eke it out, to define enough to share.
What he finds is, "I think that's what Ari means, Pen. You already cast a shadow - you inspire goodness in others. You inspire me. Maybe you don't want to hear that because you know you have more to do still, that your shadow could be longer, but I think that's the greatness we both see in you. And it's like no one else I know."
And it's true that some people never get to be looked at like that. "As to your question...I think maybe until I heard you, I was still confusing power with greatness."
mercury
"Sometimes they go hand in hand," Penelope says, and then: shift. It's a tentative shift, light-struck glancing across a lake-surface; she angles her head just so, looks at Nicholas from under her eyelashes. "But you know..." sly as a fox again, elongating the 'o' in 'know. "Today I feel powerful.We are powerful. I opened a gate, Nicholas!" That elation, see, it works itself through her again: "And you can feel where to go, even when you're blind!" Pen touches her nose to Nick's presses her mouth to his for a (quiet [ardent]) moment and then licks Nicholas's cheek. That's right: licks it! "I don't mind hearing that I inspire you; you inspire me."
crow
This sly look from Pen, and Nick has the sense that she, just before she says it - and she does. He meets that look, and at what she says he laughs. "Full circle. Very nice." And if she hadn't kissed him then he would've kissed her, so it's just as well.
She licks his cheek, and he can't quite hide the surprise that accompanies his laughter this time, either at that or that, apparently, he inspires her too. He has gotten better about accepting this when she says it through the years; perhaps he has begun to believe it, in truth. "Do you still dislike it? What Ari said."
mercury
"Yes. I mean: I still disliked it when she said it. I don't know how I might react if she says it again or you say it again; perhaps you should talk to me about how great I am." And here: she kisses him again, but deeper.
This she does not judge to be cowardice; she's giving him space to think, eh?
crow
Space to think. Sure. When he pulls back it's with a little reluctance, and he was leaning into her and is still, and that space could be closed again in half a heartbeat. Might be. "You do lead both of us, you know. I think...you show us both what's possible while you forge on ahead." A beat. "I don't think I told you, but you charging in and directing that meeting about Alex in a room full of strangers was really hot."
Though: he is still thinking, and perhaps she can see that. Something of what she relayed to him of her conversation with Ari is still tugging at him. Will, perhaps, for a while yet. So instead, his smile could cut if it wanted, though his eyes are still warm. "I'm not articulating myself well. Can I just show you instead?"
mercury
They have a lot of time (Hope) to argue over some of these points. He is still circled by her arms although it is a binding circle now instead of a guarding circle. Pen feels no urgency to dismantle what she disagrees with right now; she smiles in a way that her cheeks feel; it is vibrant; so is her surprised laughter, on a quick exhale, when he calls her 'directing' that meeting about Alex hot; and so are her eyes, in spite of the pensive shadow there. The reflective (lake-light, moon-water in a chalice - ) quality.
"Show me," she says. "Let's see you."
(And so it goes.)
